“Well, I’m ding-wizzled!” Treff blew his bewilderment from eyes, ears and nose together—blew it upon the roseate air. “At this hour—by George! it makes one’s heart slip around in one’s body, like—like—”
“Una’s—Una’s is slipping round in hers!” Pemrose caught her lip between her teeth. “Look—will you? There—she’s off into the wood, to find it—find out what it means! She so timid!... Una—come back!” she cried sharply.
At that moment there leaped into the blue eyes something that rather dazzled young Treff.
It had the flash of a bridge over a torrent—a flinty bridge.
Not for nothing had this girl a father who had bridged even space itself with his discoveries; it was her nature to build bridges—span the incredible.
“Una—come back,” she cried again—and sprang down the mountain towards her friend, in her the same feeling that had possessed her yesterday, as if her head and shoulders were being jerked backward, the rest of her going with the horse—with something runaway. “Una—that’s that’s nothing! I—I believe I know—” in half-mystified tones—“I believe I could—”
As if a spell were broken, Una turned. On the very verge of losing herself among the thick spruces, thick as hops near the precipice’s edge, she paused uncertainly.
The lovely harebells she had gathered, growing in such profusion in this wild spot—a bunch almost as big as her head—stood out, like a fluttering bluebird, against the green.
Suddenly she tossed them from her. With a frightened cry—an awakening cry—she began running blindly, climbing recklessly—not up towards Pemrose—but in the direction of the mothering arms of the Guardian, wide open to receive her.
But, again, she was “sparrow-blasted”, mystified—quivering to the core now. And the sunset drew a red muffler across her eyes.