“Look, Violet, I mean Miss Home; the moon is in crescent, and we shall have a pleasant night to walk in; won’t it be delightful?”
“Yes,” she murmured; but neither of them observed that the clouds were gathering thick and fast, and obscured all except a few struggling glimpses of scattered stars.
They came to a sort of stile formed by two logs of wood laid across the gap in a stone wall, and Kennedy vaulting over it, gave her his hand.
“Surely,” she said, stopping timidly for a moment, “we did not pass over this in coming, did we?”
Kennedy looked back. “No,” he said, “I don’t remember it; but no doubt it has been put up merely for the night to prevent the cattle from going astray.”
They went forward, but a deeper and deeper misgiving filled Violet’s mind that they had chosen a wrong road.
“I think,” she said with a fluttered voice, “that the path looks much narrower than it did this morning. Do you see the others?”
They both strained their eyes through the gloom, now rendered more thick than ever by the dark driving clouds, but they could see no trace of their companions, and though they listened intently, not the faintest sound of voices reached their eager ears.
They spoke no word, but a few steps farther brought them to a towering rock around the base of which the path turned, and then seemed to cease abruptly in a mass of loose shale. It was too clear now. They had lost their road and turned, whilst they were indulging those golden fancies, into a mere cattle-path worn by the numerous herds of goats and oxen, the music of whose jangling bells still came to them now and then in low sweet snatches from the pastures of the valley and hill.
What was to be done? They were alone amid the all but unbroken silence, and the eternal solitudes of the now terrible mountain. The darkness began to brood heavily above them; no one was in sight, and when Kennedy shouted there was no answer, but only an idle echo of his voice. Sheets of mist were sweeping round them, and at length the gusts of wind drove into their faces cold swirls of plashing rain.