They reached the summer-house on the knoll. There, Klyda stood for an instant in silence, to gaze dreamily over the moon-swept hills. The night was deathly still.
Then, of a sudden, the silences were shattered by a sound that wailed forth in hideous cadences from hill to hill; re-echoing until the placid night fairly screamed with it. Klyda gasped aloud at the horror of the plangent din, and she spun about to locate its cause.
There in the moonlight twenty feet away from her stood Jock. The dog’s every muscle was tense, as if with torture. His head was flung back. From his cavernous throat was issuing a series of long-drawn howls, slow, earsplitting, raucous,—howls of mortal anguish.
“Jock!” panted Klyda in swift terror. “Jock!”
(At the same moment, in a base hospital near Meran-en-Laye, a nurse was drawing the top of a cotton sheet over a face whose eyes would no longer need the light of day. The nurse was saying to a fellow-worker, as she performed the grim duty:
“Poor fellow! He was doing so nicely, too, till the blood poison set in.... Say, Nora, did I hear a dog howling, just then, or are my nerves going bad?”)
At the quick appeal in Klyda’s voice Jock ceased his hideous lament and stood trembling, with head bent almost to the ground. Then, through her moment of dread, that same strange sense of nearness to her husband came back upon the woman, but fiftyfold stronger than ever before since his departure. Through no volition of her own, she heard herself whisper timidly:
“Dick?”
As she spoke, the collie raised his head, as in joyous greeting. He came swiftly over to where his mistress stood.