Maida told the story of her visit to the Moraine Land, not leaving out a detail. Silva listened intently, her strange eyes unwinkingly fixed on Maida’s face. “What time was this?” Silva asked.
Maida told her.
“Oh she only missed one feeding then,” Silva said in a tone of acute relief. “You can just imagine,” she went on, “when I came out of the faint enough to remember about the baby, how I felt. I tried to tell them here about Nesta, but nobody would listen to me. They thought I was raving and I can’t blame them for that of course. I begged them, I screamed at them; then suddenly I thought of you—why I don’t know. But somehow I knew I could trust you. I asked them to call you up or let me call you up. But they wouldn’t. ‘There! There!’ they would say, ‘Lie down and sleep! You’ll be all right in the morning.’ Oh what I went through! I thought I was going crazy! And then I heard somebody using the telephone in the hall. And when they left me to go down to dinner, I crept out and called you up. Nobody heard me. They don’t know yet that I telephoned. I told them last night that I knew you’d come this morning.”
“It must have made you dizzy to stand up,” Maida said sympathetically.
“It did. At first I thought I couldn’t stand it. But I had to do it and so I did. You are sure Nesta is all right?”
“Sure!” Maida reiterated, smiling. “But why didn’t you call up Aunt Save?”
“She was at the Warneford Fair. They all went. Tyma went too. Aunt Save’s telling fortunes. Tyma and I have been making baskets for a month. He thought he could probably sell them all in three days. We talked it all over. One of us had to go and the other to stay with the baby and of course I was the one to stay with Nesta. Tyma won’t be back until to-morrow.”
“But I don’t understand why Nesta was in the cave,” Maida declared in a puzzled tone.
Silva closed her eyes for a moment and she sighed. It was a long sigh and a weary one to come from a little girl’s lips.