"That wasn't so bad, since it did catch them," said Stanley. "My horror would have been when it climbed the tree after them!..."
"That is the part that has increased," put in the schoolboy husband, beginning to shake again. "It now jumps after them from one tree to another," and then they both spluttered insanely, and Diana joined in because it was so infectious, and Ailsa called them all ridiculous children who ought to be given a sweetie and tucked up in bed.
A little later the cavalcade got under way, and Grenville and his wife stood waving to them somewhat sorrowfully from their wilderness home.
"They are dear people," Ailsa said; and added, "O, Billy, if Major Carew would but come out of his shell and love Meryl!... I am sure she cares for him ... and she is so sweet ... and he—O, he is just like a figure of stone."
Grenville pinched her ear affectionately. "Little matchmaker! No one by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature; and no one by just wishing it, I am inclined to think, can influence the little god Cupid whither he will aim his arrow. Perhaps, perhaps not; that is all there is to say ever."
The next morning after a very early breakfast, the travellers started on their way to Enkeldorn en route for Salisbury. And at the top of the valley, whither they walked to save the mules, both girls stood and turned for a long last look at the grey walls of the ancient temple, lying in a soft haze of morning mists. It seemed to Meryl it had never held a deeper fascination, a stronger allurement. Just those old, old walls, and the soft enfolding mists which must have enfolded them even so for perhaps three thousand years. The red of sunrise was still in the sky, for Mr. Pym was an early starter, and it tinged the mist with a soft flush where the sun's rays had not yet lit a clearer light.
"It was good to come," said Diana simply. "I have to thank you for it."
But Meryl only smiled in response. She had nothing to say. She felt she was leaving behind with the ruins the best memory her life would ever hold. Then they climbed into the ambulance waiting for them, said "good-bye" charmingly to the lonely dwellers at the store and hotel, with whom they had had some pleasant chats, drinking tea and admiring the lovely view from their delightful huts, and went clattering away down the road, their faces turned to the north.
And in the valley they left behind there was desolation.
Carew arrived back at his quarters, grim and taciturn, in the evening, to find Stanley looking a veritable image of disconsolate hopelessness in spite of Moore's persistent droll badinage.