She and Morgan were going abroad. Morgan had foreign business which made the journey imperative, and it was only when the courts adjourned and political matters fell quiet with the coming of summer that he could so long be away from his practice and his public affairs, but Anne could not think of Europe now. Her thoughts turned mutinously to imagined vistas seen from a rock at the lop of Slag-face across valleys where sunset cast the shadows of mountains: where just now the dogwood was in a foam of blossom and the laurel would soon be in pink flowering.
CHAPTER XLII
When Victor McCalloway came home in June he read in the face of the young man he met there that chapters deeply shadowed had been written into his life, and Boone was prompt enough in his confessions, though when he alluded to Anne's approaching marriage his words became meagre and his utterance flat with a hampering distrust of emotion and self-betrayal.
McCalloway gazed off grave-eyed across the small door-yard and mercifully refrained from any hurtful attempt at verbal solace.
Finally when the hum of bees in the honeysuckle had been the only disturbers of their long silence, the Scotchman spoke—and the younger features relaxed into relief because the words did not, even in kindness, touch upon the soreness of his mood. "The old spruce over there—the one that used to be the tallest thing we saw—it's gone, isn't it?"
Boone nodded. "The sleet took it down last winter."
Victor McCalloway was sage enough in human diagnosis to divine that, however much Boone had suffered through a period of months, the expression of quiet but well nigh unendurable suffering that just now haunted his eyes had not been constant in them. A man subjected long to that soul-cramping stress, with no outlet or abatement, would have become a melancholiac. In one sense it might be a chronic wretchedness, but today some particular incitement had rendered it acute—acute beyond the power of stoic blood to hold in concealment.
Repression only made the gnawing ache more burdensome. McCalloway wished that Boone might have gone, like the less inhibited folk of an elder generation, to some wailing wall and beat his breast with clenched fists—and come away less pent with hard control.
"I'll just go in and have a look over my scant accumulation of mail," he said with the same Anglo-Saxon pretence of armour-plated emotion. "In these days even the hermit doesn't altogether escape letters."