She was wondering how she could tell him, covering him with tender, pitiful glances, and praying that he would not leave her, that no hurt might come to him, when he asked suddenly:
"Have you seen anything of Deirdre, mother?"
He had been moving restlessly about the room, lifting things from their place on the mantelpiece and putting them back again.
She called him to her and, putting her hands on his head, told him what Mrs. Ross had said.
Davey's face hardened and whitened slowly. He put her hands away from him and wheeled unsteadily from the room. She heard him go across the yard, and saw him stumbling up the narrow track to the trees on the far side of the hill.
CHAPTER XLVII
Mrs. Cameron was feeding her chickens when she thought she heard someone calling. She listened, and decided that it was only a whispering of wind in the trees that had caught her ear.
The mild light of the evening lingered about her. Her eyes lay on the hill that rose with a gentle slope beyond the yard, the barns and stable, and a score of low-built brushwood sheds. Mists were beginning to gather among the trees that fringed the top on either side. Davey had gone up among those trees.
The sound of her name called faintly again disturbed her. She looked down towards the road that wound uphill out of the forest. It was wraith-like in the twilight, the long white gate that barred it from the paddock about the house, growing dim. The gum saplings of two or three years' growth, with their powdery-grey leaves pressing on the far side of the fence behind the barn, shivered as the surface of still water shivers when something stirs beneath it. Her eyes were directed towards the centre of the almost imperceptible movement.