She had caught his hands again, her rigid face close to his, "What hollow?—speak!" she said breathlessly.
"The hollow whar a friend o' mine struck silver. He'll take yur in."
Her head sank against his shoulder. "Let me stay here," she answered, "and wait."
He supported her tenderly, feeling the gentle brushing of her hair against his cheek as in the old days. He was content to wait, holding her thus. They were very silent; her eyes half closed, as if in exhaustion, yet with the strange suggestion of listening in the vacant pupils.
"Ye ain't hearin' anythin', deary?" he said, with a troubled face.
"No; but everything is so deathly still," she said in a frightened whisper.
It certainly was very still. A singular hush seemed to have slid over the landscape; there was no longer any sound from the mill; there was an ominous rest in the woodland, so perfect that the tiny rustle of an uneasy wing in the tree above them had made them start; even the moonlight seemed to hang suspended in the air.
"It's like the lull before the storm," she said with her strange laugh.
But the non-imaginative Collinson was more practical. "It's mighty like that earthquake weather before the big shake thet dried up the river and stopped the mill. That was just the time I got the news o' your bein' dead with yellow fever. Lord! honey, I allus allowed to myself thet suthin' was happenin' to ye then."
She did not reply; but he, holding her figure closer to him, felt it trembling with a nervous expectation. Suddenly she threw him off, and rose to her feet with a cry. "There!" she screamed frantically, "they've come! they've come!"