The stooping was not good for her—he felt that, together with a few other matters incidental to her situation. He waited for the long breath he knew she would draw on straightening herself.
It came. He hoped that her other shoe needed tying; but it did not.
He watched her as she stood there with her back to him. She was sending her eyes out to the Western headlands.
“No, my Prince; on the whole I’m not disappointed,” she said. “That picture repays me for my toil by sea and land. What a picture! But what would it be to be here with—with—love!”
That was all she said.
He thought it was quite enough.
She stood there like a statue of white marble set among the black rocks. She was absolutely motionless for some minutes; and then the sigh that fluttered from her lips was, he knew, a different expression altogether from that which had come from her when she had straightened herself on fastening her shoe.
His father was a connoisseur in sighs; Harold did not profess to have the same amount of knowledge on the subject, but still he knew something. He could distinguish roughly on some points incidental to the sigh as a medium of expression.
After that little gasp which was not quite a gasp, she was again silent; then she whispered, but by no means gently, the one word “Idiot!” and in another second she had sent her voice into the still night in a wild musical cry—such a cry as anyone gifted with that imaginative power which Brian had declared to be so necessary for archæological research, might attribute to the Banshee—the White Lady of Irish legends.
She repeated the cry an octave higher and then she executed what is technically known as a “scale” but ended with that same weird cry of the Banshee.