CHAPTER XXXI
They walked through the evening.
Dusk had fallen and in the drowsy half-lights the world stretched itself in peacefulness.
They had come to a flat country that whispered in grass; there were no more of the little hills that roll and fall and roll; there were scarcely any trees; here and there in great space a beech swung its slow boughs and made a quiet noise in the stillness; here and there a stiff tree lifted its lonely greenness, and around it the vast horizon stretched away and away to sightlessness.
There was silence here, there was deep silence, and over all the dusk drowsed and folded and increased.
With what slow veils the darkness deepened! the gentle weaver spun her thin webs and drooped soft coverings from the sky to the clay; momently the stars came flashing their tiny signals, gathering their bright hosts by lonely clusters, and one thin sickle of the moon grew from a cloud and stood distantly as a sign of gold.
But the quiet beauty of the heavens and the quiet falling to sleep of the earth had for this night no effect on one of our travellers.
Mac Cann was ill at ease. He was moody and irritable, and he moved from Eileen Ni Cooley to his daughter and back again to Eileen Ni Cooley and could not content himself with either of them.