"Indeed? And how, may I ask?"
At first she did not answer, but eyed him gloatingly as a cat might eye a mouse. And then she said slowly, "It was that pack of lies you told me about the doings of the lads at Moongrass. Your son isn't at Moongrass—nor ever has been, nor ever will be."
"What do you mean?" he cried hoarsely.
"Mean?" she said with a shrill, triumphant laugh. "I mean this—on the night of the thirty-first of October, when the Silent People are abroad, he heard Duke Aubrey's summons, and followed it across the hills."
"Woman ... what ... what ... speak ... or ..." and the veins in Master Nathaniel's temples were swelling, and a fire seemed to have been lighted in his brain.
Her laughter redoubled. "You'll never see your son again!" she jeered. "Young Ranulph Chanticleer has gone to the land whence none returns."
Not for a moment did he doubt the truth of her words. Before his inward eye there flashed the picture he had seen in the pattern on the ceiling, just before losing consciousness—Ranulph weeping among the fields of gillyflowers.
A horror of impotent tenderness swept over him. While, with the surface of his mind, he supposed that this was IT springing out at him at last. And parallel with the agony, and in no way mitigating it, was a sense of relief—the relaxing of tension, when one can say, "Well, it has come at last."
He turned a dull eye on the widow, and said, a little thickly, "The land from which no one returns ... but I can go there, too."
"Follow him across the hills?" she cried scornfully. "No; you are not made of that sort of stuff."