SKIRLE Cottage lies tucked away in a hollow of Blencarn Fell.

The fells, as I have before indicated, are one great sweep of low hills facing the west; they are continuous and almost unbroken yet by the local custom they are divided into sections, each with a name of its own.

Blencarn Fell, so called, perhaps, from the village of Blencarn at its foot, is as wild and, perhaps, in summer, as lovely as any other part of the Pennine Range.

Skirle Cottage, lying in a depression of it, was as far removed from human eye as it is possible for a house to be.

It was a fairly large cottage, a barn was attached to it in the Cumberland fashion, so that the whole building was of one piece.

The hollow in which it lay, was, of a summer afternoon, perfumed with the smell of those wild flowers that grow in Cumberland as they grow nowhere else, and filled with the murmur of bees. At dusk of a summer’s evening it was a veritable cup of twilight and silence.

Even in summer, when the sky was blue above, when the wild strawberries were in their glory and the hills were hazy with heat, there was something strangely melancholy about this tiny valley, with the little cottage nestling in its heart.

There were days in the long winter of Cumberland when the valley and the cottage seen from above, presented a picture dreary to the point of being tragic.

The high road, at the foot of the fells, was scarcely a quarter of a mile away, yet the cottage was quite invisible from it.

The Arol-Johnston car, with its single occupant, drew up on the road level with the unseen cottage. Sir Anthony Gyde descended, and leaving the car to take care of itself, opened the gate, passed through, and struck up the rising ground.

There was not a breath of wind, the air was keen with frost, there was not a living thing in sight, save in the sky, far up, under the cold grey clouds, a hawk poised, now moving with a flutter of the wings, now motionless as a stone.

One might stand here seemingly unseen; it would have appeared that one might commit any act, unseen by eye, save the eye of God. Yet far up the fell, so small a figure as to be unnoticeable, a boy, Robert Lewthwaite, son of a shoe-maker in Blencarn, attracted by the hum of the approaching car on the high road far below, was watching.

From that elevation he could see the car approaching; he saw it stop and the occupant get out. He recognized him at once as Sir Anthony Gyde. He saw him cross the field and enter the little valley.

Here Sir Anthony looked around him, sweeping the fell face as though to see if he were observed. Apparently satisfied, he knocked at the cottage door; the door was opened for hi............