Excited and exhausted, Kate and Emily tried to eat their meal. They had arrived only minutes before. Days of bouncing along in a carriage, nervous and bored, had carried them from their father’s tame green meadows to this remote country. Last night they had stayed in a little village on the shore of Hollow Lake. The innkeeper had pointed across the great oval lake to the forested hills beyond. A high, bald promontory faced them on the other side, and cliffs and bluffs tumbled haphazardly down to the smooth surface of the water.

“That’s Hallow Hill land, miss,” he had said to Kate. “The tall rocks there, that’s the Hill itself. But it’ll take you all morning to get around the lake and the forest. No roads go through the woods by the Hill. They’d not dare to put a road there.” My land, thought Kate in surprise. She hadn’t expected it to be so wild.

“And what a beauty you are, my dear,” Aunt Celia said to Kate. “You favor your mother, doesn’t she, Prim? She was slender and small boned, too, such a graceful woman. She had the pick of the men in her day.”

Kate tried to smile at these kind remarks, but she found them rather embarrassing. She didn’t think of herself as a beauty, although she knew her mother had been one. In fact, Kate was uncommonly pretty. Her long blond hair formed small curls around her face, and she had a dignity and poise unusual for her age. Perhaps this was because she had spent so much time with her father. That lonely gentleman had lavished hours each day on her education. He saw a strength in her gentle nature that he openly admired, and this strength had carried the quiet Kate bravely through the last two months without him.

Rawboned and large handed, Primrose Roberts didn’t smile as often as her sister Celia, but this didn’t mean she was ill-tempered. She studied the blushing Kate, noting her fair skin and large, dark blue eyes.