“And was my father”—she spoke of him as if he were merely a strange name: she could never connect herself with him—“was he dark?”
“He had dark-brown hair and dark eyes and a fresh colouring. He went bald, rather bald, when he was quite young,” replied her mother, also as if telling a tale which was just old imagination.
“Was he good-looking?”
“Yes—he was very good-looking—rather small. I have never seen an Englishman who looked like him.”
“Why?”
“He was”—the mother made a quick, running movement with her hands—“his figure was alive and changing—it was never fixed. He was not in the least steady—like a running stream.”
It flashed over the youth—Anna too was like a running stream. Instantly he was in love with her again.
Tom Brangwen was frightened. His heart always filled with fear, fear of the unknown, when he heard his women speak of their bygone men as of strangers they had known in passing and had taken leave of again.
In the room, there came a silence and a singleness over all their hearts. They were separate people with separate destinies. Why should they seek each to lay violent hands of claim on the other?
The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in the dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a dark blue shadow.