We hadn’t heard a beginning of the sounds when we had listened from the verandas. They had been muffled there, dim and hushed, but here they seemed to speak just in your ear. Sea-birds called and shrieked, owls uttered their mournful complaints, brush cracked and rustled as little, eager-eyed furry things crept through. Once I started and the gun leaped upward in my arms as some great sea-fish, likely a tarpon, leaped and splashed just beyond the rock wall.
“What is it, Killdare?” Weldon called. His voice was sharp and urgent.
“Some fish jumped, that was all,” I answered. And again the silence dropped down.
The tide-waves burst with ever-increasing fury. The stars were ever brighter, and their companies ever larger, in the deep, violet spaces of the sky. The hours passed. The lights in the great colonial house behind us winked out, one by one.
There was no consolation in glancing at my watch. It served to make the time pass more slowly. The hour drew to midnight, after a hundred years or so of waiting; the night had passed its apex and had begun its swift descent to dawn. And all at once the thickets rustled and stirred behind me.
No man can be blamed for whipping about, startled in the last, little nerve, in such a moment as this. Some one was hastening down to the shore of the lagoon—some one that walked lightly, yet with eagerness. I could even hear the long, wet grass lashing against her ankles.
“Who is it?” I asked quietly.
“Edith,” some one answered from the gloom.
Many important things in life are forgotten, and small ones kept; and my memory will harbor always the sound of that girlish voice, so clear and full in the darkness. Though she spoke softly her whole self was reflected in the tone. It was sweet, tender, perhaps even a little startled and fearful. In a moment she was at my side.