“If you could only always come this way when I want you, everything would be so different, so much easier,” he said in a low tone. “I was surrounded by devils and they were getting tight hold of me when you came round that corner.”
He glanced at her sidewise with a slight, quizzical smile.
This time she did not answer his look, but with her eyes on the bay, her brows drawn together, asked,
“New devils or old ones?”
“The old ones, but they’ve grown bigger and twice as hard to manage lately. They——” he broke off, his voice suddenly roughened, and said, “I don’t seem to know how to live my life.”
He turned his face away from her. The demons she had exorcised had left him weakened. In the bright sunshine, with the woman he loved beside him, he felt broken and beaten down by the hardships of his fate.
“Sit down and talk to me,” she said quietly. “No one can hear you. It’s like being all alone in the world up here on the hilltop. We can sit on this stone.”
There was a broken boulder behind them, close to the narrow foot-way, and she sat on it, motioning him to a flat piece of rock beside her. Her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her loose gray coat, the wisps of fair hair that escaped below the rim of her hat fanning up and down in faint breaths of air, like delicate threads of seaweed in ocean currents.
“Tell me the whole thing,” she said. “You and I have never talked much about your affairs. And what concerns you concerns me.”
He pricked at the earth with the tip of his cane, ashamed of his moment of weakness, and yet fearing if he told her of his cares it might return.