It was about five o’clock, though it would not be daylight for a long while yet. Claude was lying partially asleep: I say partially, because he seemed listening to the wind roaring through the leafless boughs of the trees, and every now and then causing the twiglets to tap and creak against the panes; but he thought he was at sea, and that the rushing sound was the rushing of waves, the creaking the yielding of the ship’s timbers to the force of the seas.
Suddenly he sprang half up in bed and listened intently, painfully.
He had distinctly heard some one in the room calling him. He could not be mistaken, and the voice seemed Meta’s.
“Claude! Claude!” cried the voice again, and his heart almost stood still for a moment as he saw a figure, which his imagination magnified a hundredfold, near the bed. “Claude?”
Next moment Alba, the snow-bird, alighted on his breast.
He slept soundly soon after this, but still when he appeared at breakfast he was so jaded looking and restless as to cause his mother considerable anxiety. He stoutly refused to see a medical man, however.
“It is nothing,” he laughed. “Nothing, dear mother, only slight fatigue. A sailor like myself thinks little of travelling a thousand miles by sea, yet dreads the rolling, jolting train.”
There was plenty to do and think about all day, well calculated to banish care. The villagers, the tenants, and neighbours all round were delighted to see the manly face and handsome figure of young Claude Alwyn once more among them, still accompanied by his pet—his spirit-bird, as the older cottagers had come to call it.
Then, although grouse were wild, there were hares in plenty, and fish in the river ready to be wooed by the gentle art of so true a fisherman as Claude Alwyn. And the walking exercise, through the heather hills, the fresh air, and the balmy breath of pine trees, never failed to refresh and invigorate him both in mind and body, so that he always returned to dinner buoyant and hopeful. But ever at the breakfast-table there was that weary look of carking care in his face.
He would go no further, however, in explaining it than confessing he did not sleep very well at night.