But Cruikshank shook his head.
"It'll have cleared off by lunch-time," he replied. And he was right. As we sat down to lunch, the bright white sun, looking as though the passage of those clouds had burnished it, rolled out into the strip of blue which so anxiously I had been stitching into Dutchmen's trousers all the morning. When the meal was over, we walked out into the garden.
There is such color in Ireland after rain, as you will never see in any other country in the world. Blues, purples and greens, deep as the dyes they knew of in Tyre and Sidon, spread far away into every distance that your eyes can find. Across the Bay of Ballysheen, as we stood there then, the purple cliffs of Helvic Head sank nobly down into a sea of emerald. On the far horizon rose the misty mountains, blue as the light of moonstones in the sun.
"And this is what I am going to leave behind," said I.
Cruikshank laid a hand affectionately on my shoulder.
"You've only to say the word and I'll get Tierney to go up to the cottage in the hollow to-morrow morning."
I shook my head and tried to laugh. It was so like his goodness, and seemed so impossible to me then. So he turned away and strolled down by the beds where by now his Lady Grizels and his Young Lord Nelsons are no longer babies together in their kindergarten, but young women and young men with all the summer of life stretched out before them.
"So you've really made up your mind?" said Bellwattle.
"I'm afraid so," I replied. "I don't think you know what it is to be alone." I waited then to get a pause, and after it I turned to her suddenly and said, "Did you know who that man was we passed yesterday?"
"No," she replied, nervously. "Who?"