This man-Davey was a strange to her. Her heart yearned over him, as though her baby had been snatched from her arms. She wanted to know him, to understand his ways of thinking. But he had a new and strange manner with her. His mind was shut. He kissed her in a perfunctory fashion, and when she put her arms round him, he stiffened under them. In sympathetic sensitive fashion she knew that he was guarding the kingdom of himself against her. She had some subtle warning that he was afraid of her love, of her tenderness, which, with its fine edge, might prize open the inner shell of his being and discover the trouble and tremulous fury of emotion which lay hidden within.
She was afraid of offending him, afraid of approaching him with her affection and sympathy, afraid not to respect the reserve that he had put between them. Yet her anxiety tormenting her, one day she said:
"Tell me what is troubling you, Davey? Tell me. It is breaking my heart to see you like this."
"There's nothing to tell, mother," he replied sharply.
For a long time he had not been coming home till late. The silence of the long evenings when she sat and sewed by the fire and Donald Cameron glowered into it, smoking, had been unbroken. Sometimes he had asked where Davey was. Then she stilled the tremors in her voice to say quietly that she thought he was with the Rosses or at Mrs. Hegarty's for the dancing.
CHAPTER XXVI
When Davey came in from the Wirree, the night after Mrs. Cameron had been to see Deirdre and the Schoolmaster, Donald Cameron was standing before the fire.
He had said nothing all the way of the long drive from Wirreeford; but his wife, by the set of his face, knew that something unusual had happened. He stood before the fireplace waiting for Davey to come home, listening for the sound of his horse's feet, the yelping of the dogs in the yard that would announce his arrival.
Before they had left the sale-yards, as he was sitting in the high buggy before they drove off, he had sent her back to look for Davey and tell him to come home as soon as the sales were over. Davey, a lean, lithe figure, on the edge of a group of stockmen, had recognised the urgency in her voice, the appeal of her eyes, as she gave him the message.