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bottom end there? Lovely they are, we took a first prize with them in Gllanmerran this year.' He walked beside her down the path as he spoke, urging her towards the prize blooms he was so proud of, and Helen went, unprotesting, intrigued by his obvious pride in the roses and finding his company far more congenial than that of his employer. She once again admired the deep red velvety blooms and breathed the heady scent, while Dai Hughes smiled at her broadly, accepting her admiration as personal acclaim.
    Right at the edge of the garden where a hedge of lesser roses bordered a footpath she stopped to look at the rapidly rising ground. The path rose with the mountain, curving round it like a ribbon and disappearing out of Sight some thirty or forty feet up. The light was fading now, but slowly, and it was still quite strong, but there were shadows under the dark mass of rock that rose before them, shadows that made it difficult to see clearly for any distance and distorted the scrub that grew on the lower slopes into odd shapes of movement.
    Helen caught her breath suddenly as a movement, more definite than any of the others, stirred among the lower scrub, almost up to the hedge of roses, and Dai Hughes, hearing her intake, looked at her sharply.
    'Something wrong, miss?' He followed her gaze, narrowing his eyes to see in the bad light.
    'Something moved down there,' she said, feeling a little foolish for behaving so nervously, there was something about Glyntarrach that seemed to sharpen all her senses. The man peered at the scrub, only half convinced, she thought.
    'I don't see anything, miss. It was probably only a sheep. They run about on the mountain, you know, but they're harmless you know, they wouldn't hurt nobody, not them old woollies.' It seemed to her that he was trying rather too hard to convince her, and she wondered why.
    'It wasn't a sheep,' she argued, going forward to the hedge again, and he laughed easily.
    'Then what else would it be, miss?' he asked. 'We ain't haunted not as far as I know, though 'twouldn't surprise me too much if we was.'
    She turned startled eyes on him, then laughed at her own folly, blaming tiredness and her own over sensitivity to the place for her unfamiliar edginess. ‘I suppose I am being silly,' she confessed, walking back towards him. ‘It was probably a trick of the light, but for a moment I thought—I thought I saw—someone. A person.' She laughed again to cover her embarrassment. 'It's this wild country, it's making me imagine things.'
    ' Maybe,' he said, a smile wide on his good-natured face, 'or maybe you did see someone, but if you did it wouldn't do to go looking to see who it was; might be embarrassing, see? We'd best go back, miss, before some hefty quarryman comes after us with a balled fist.' His chuckle made its own explanations and she nodded understanding, recalling Evan Davies' ‘Wild Hills' and the passages that Owen Neath had referred to as 'earthy '.
    Scarcely had they turned to move away, however, than she heard a sound behind them that sent her spinning round only a fraction of a second before Dai Hughes. A girl was watching them from the other side of the hedge of roses. She had a steady gaze that Helen found disturbing and her eyes were dark and deep-set with rings of grey below the bottom lids. She looked as if she had slept little of late and there was a glint of desperation in the deep eyes ,that aroused Helen's sympathy. Dai Hughes had known it was her moving about there in the shadows, of that Helen was sure, and he shook his head slowly at her: Small white teeth bit into a full lower lip painfully and she looked as if she would have cried.
    She could have been no more than twenty or twenty-one, but there was such an air of sadness about her that one wondered how anyone so young could have suffered so much sadness. Dai Hughes was looking at her, his blue eyes soft with pity for her. ‘Not yet, Miss Owen,' he said softly. 'I’m sorry, love.' The dark