"Why, we've got back into the track!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," laughed he. "When the town began to appear through the mist it was a landmark to me, though I believe I tumbled over the path at last by a mere chance."
He said no more. We were soon out into the high-road again, and climbing the street of the town. We were the only stirring people in it, and this made me feel more conscious of my strange adventure than all the hours that I had spent alone on the marsh with my companion.
For the first time I began to wonder what mother would say. Once out of the town, we sped silently along the straight, familiar road that led towards our own village. The mist was beginning slowly, very slowly, to clear away, and the hills upon which our farm stood loomed out of it in the distance. In the marsh, on either side of us, the cattle began to stir like their own ghosts in the white vapor, and gazed at us across the dikes with wondering, sleepy eyes.
The stars were all dead, and above the mist the quiet sky spread a panoply of steely blue, while out above the sea the purple streaks had turned to silver and sent rays upward into the great dome. Hung like a curtain across the gates of some wonderful world unseen, a rosy radiance spread from the bosom of the ocean far into the downy clouds above that so tenderly covered the naked blue—a radiance that every moment was more and more marvellously illumined by that mysterious inward fire, whose even distant being could tip every hill and mountain of cloudland with a lining of molten gold. Unconsciously my gaze clung to the spot where a warmth so far-reaching sprung from so dainty a border-land of opal coloring; and when at last the great flame was born of the sea's gray breast, I felt the tears come into my eyes, I don't know why, and a little sigh of content rose from my heart. I was tired, for the sunrise had never brought tears to my eyes before.
"I hope you'll be none the worse," said Harrod, glancing at me uneasily, and urging the horse with voice and hand; "but I'm afraid your parents will have been sadly anxious anyhow."
Alas! I had not thought of it again. I sat silent, watching where the familiar solid curves of the fortress upon the marsh began to take shape out of the fog.
"If I hadn't met you I should have been out on yonder marsh now," I said.
I thought he would have said something about being glad he had met me, but he did not. He only answered, "I ought not to have allowed you to fall asleep."
I laughed at that. "If it had not been for you I should be asleep now on that bank where I first heard you," I declared. "And I should have got my death of ague by this time, I suppose."