“Nay, Tom,” interrupted Owen, but Tom silenced him.
The next morning Tom stood outside the hedge that enclosed their grey-stone mountain cottage, pointing with his finger.
“Well, more to the west, so.”
“Aye,” replied the Stranger, scanning Bryn Bannog, its steep meadows, its rocks tufted with golden gorse, its craggy spine from which the mist was lifting; “yes, the path is plain.”
The Stranger set his eyes southward up the mountain. After a while he turned to look back at the cottage cradled in the fields below; beyond the valley, Moelwyn, massive and green; eastward, Cynicht, sharp and grey; and still farther east, a vast wilderness of crag tumbled hither and thither down to the very edge of the glimmering sea. “Hope goes with me, little one,” he said, and turned to climb higher. At the summit he looked westward; there lay a lake blue as a meadow-flower, and half-way down, by the little brook Tom had described, there was a large circle of loose stones.
The Stranger hurried forward. He glanced at the sun, and began by the edge of the circle near the brook, turning up the soggy earth in large clods. He dug feverishly, working hour after hour. He lay down and pulled the earth away in rolls, the wet drenching him, still hoping against hope. He took the clods of earth and dashed them against the rocks where they broke noiselessly. He looked about as if praying that some power might come to him from the blue distance or the sky above or the golden sun; then he sank on the stones and wept. The little green snake that crept by in the grass, the snail that trailed over the sod, heard him weep, and the cry that came from him, “My little one, my little one, was it for this?”
The afternoon swung its shadows eastward, and the roof of the cottage lay in a pointed figure on the grass beyond the hedge. Two men bearing something toiled up the path to the hedge gate. As the sun set behind Bryn Bannog the pointed roof-shadow drew in, and the shadow from the hedge lay on the grass in a dark ribbon, growing narrower and fainter. From the distant summit a single figure dropped slowly downhill, the autumn dusk closing around it. In the windows candle-light flickered; a woman came to the west door and looked uphill. She seemed troubled and she had been crying.
“Brothers, he is comin’,” called Jane, “he is close by the house. Och, be kind to him for the child’s sake! It is not too late even now.”
“Well, Stranger,” said Tom, appearing at the door, “did you find aught?”