"Will time speed swifter here, Auna?"
"I hope it will, father," she answered, "but the days will be very like each other."
"Days too like each other drag," he told her. "We must change the pattern of the days. It shan't be all work for you. We'll do no work sometimes, and now and then you'll go for a holiday down to the 'in country,' and I shall be alone till you come back."
"I'm never going to leave you alone," she said. "If you think upon a holiday for me, you've got to come too, or have Peter up here for a bit."
"There's only one other thing beside the moor that's good to me; and that's the sea; and you well love to be on the sea, so we might go to it now and again."
Auna's eyes sparkled.
"I'd like that dearly," she told him.
"To know the sea better may be a wise deed for me," he said. "Some it hurts and cannot comfort—so I've heard. Not that it could ever be a friend to me, like the hills."
"You'd love it better and better, specially if you'd sail out on to it, same as I did with Uncle Lawrence."
Her father nodded and this allusion did not banish his placid mood. The sun rays were growing slant and rich as they set out for home. Auna laughed at their shadows flung hugely before them. Then they descended and she walked silently for a long way with her hand in her father's hand. But she was content despite their silence, for she knew that his mind had passed into a little peace. She often wondered why the desert solitudes cheered him, for they cast her down. She liked to leave it behind her—that great, lonely thing—and descend into the kindly arms of the Red House trees and the welcome of the river. For the river itself, in Auna's ear, sang a different song beside her home, than aloft, in its white nakedness, and loneliness. There it was elfin and cold and silvery, but it did not seem to sing for her; while beneath, at the feet of the pines, under the bridge of logs, in the pools and stickles she knew to the last mossy boulder—there her name river had music for her alone and she understood it. It was a dear friend who would never pass away out of her life, or die and leave her to mourn. A time was coming when she would know it better still, see it aloft nigh its cradle, learn its other voices, that yet were strange to her. In the valley the river was old and wise; perhaps aloft, where it ran nigh Huntingdon, it was not so wise or tender, but younger and more joyous.