She questioned him no further. "Come," she said, "reach your arm in at the window and draw the bolt, and afterwards we will pull the shutter and nail it. Are you going inside for a last look around?"
He laughed. "Why? The knapsacks are here, ready."
"Our home!"
"I take the soul of it with me, taking you."
It was prettily said. Yet perversely she remembered how he had once spoken of Margaret Dance, saying, "Let the dead bury their dead."
The sky, after six angry days—two sullen, four tempestuous—was clear again and promised another stretch of fair weather. This was important, for they counted on having to sleep a night in the open before reaching the M'Lauchlins' camp. Old Strongtharm had told Sir Oliver of a cave at the head of the pass and directed him how to find it. Should the sky's promise prove false, they would descend back to the hut. Snow was their one serious peril.
They carried but the barest necessaries; for although the worst of the falls lay below and behind them, the upper part of the Gap was arduous enough, and the more difficult for being unknown; also Sir Oliver had old Strongtharm's assurance that the M'Lauchlins would furnish them with all things requisite for voyaging by water.
Sir Oliver climbed in silence. He was flinging a bridge, albeit a short one, across the unknown, and the risk of it weighed on him. For himself this would have counted nothing, but he was learning the lesson common to all male animals whose mates for the first time travel beside them. As for Ruth, it was wonderful—the course of the path once turned, the small home left out of sight—how securely she breasted the upward path. Her lover and she were as gods walking, treading the roof of the world.
Through thickets they climbed, and by stairways beside the singing falls. In a pool below one of these falls they surprised a great loon that had resorted here to live solitary through his moulting-season. He rose and winged away with a cry like an inhuman laugh; and they recognised a sound which had often been borne down the gorge—once or twice at night, to awake and puzzle them.
They came to the uppermost fall a good hour before sunset, and after a little search Sir Oliver found the cave. They could have pushed on, but decided to sleep here: and they slept soundly, being in truth more weary than their spirits, exhilarated in the high air, allowed them to guess.