“Is that you Paddy!” he asked.
“Yes, Jack!” came the answer, and he felt vaguely that there were tears in her voice.
He went forward with outstretched hands, and took her unresisting ones, trying to see into her face.
“I thought you were never coming,” he said.
She gulped down a sob, and big tears splashed upon his hand.
“What is it!” he asked, feeling cold suddenly.
The little wavelets hushed their singing, a twittering bird stopped to listen; over the majestic sleeping mountains, the shining stars, the steadfast heavens, the sentinel trees, the shimmering, wistful loch, there seemed to spread the hush of a spirit of pain, as he heard her say in a trembling voice:
“We have to leave The Ghan House, and the mountains, and the loch, and go and begin over again somewhere else.”
He said nothing—what was there to say! To both of them the words were like a sentence of doom.