The wind was howling across the desolate moors. It was an incredibly howly wind, and they were almost unbelievably desolate moors. Such desolation has seldom been howled upon by wild winds anywhere, ever, throughout the records of time, since the unimaginably distant past when the moors were an alluvial plain across which roamed weird primitive beasts. Once those beasts howled here, now it was the wind, ferocious in its onslaught upon the barren emptiness of the moors. Barren and empty and desolate but for a tiny ramshackle near-dilapidated cottage hunched alongside the single faint path that stretched across the moors, twisting and winding and leading none knew where. It was in this vile brickish habitude that Pallid Ada, the Crippled Heiress, eked out her sorrowful existence.