CHAPTER III.
LOST IN THE SEA.
There was no moon that night. When the darkness began to gather swiftly, Caius swung his basket of fish and his tackle over his shoulder and tramped homeward. His preference was to go round by the road and avoid the Day farm; then he thought it might be his duty to go that way, because it might chance that the woman needed protection as he passed. It is much easier to give such protection in intention than in deed; but, as it happened, the deed was not required. The farmstead was perfectly still as he went by it again.
He went on half a mile, passing only such friendly persons as it was natural he should meet on the public road. They were few. Caius walked listening to the sea lapping below the low cliff near which the road ran, and watching the bats that often circled in the dark-blue dusk overhead. Thus going on, he gradually recognised a little group walking in front of him. It was the woman, Mrs. Day, and her three children. Holding a child by either hand, she tramped steadily forward. Something in the way she walked, in the way the children walked—a dull, mechanical action in their steps—perplexed Caius.
He stepped up beside them with a word of neighbourly greeting.
The woman did not answer for some moments; when she did, although her words were ordinary, her voice seemed to Caius to come from out some far distance whither her mind had wandered.
"Going to call on someone, I suppose, Mrs. Day?" said he, inwardly anxious.
"Yes," she replied; "we're going to see a friend—the children and me."
Again it seemed that there was some long distance between her and the young man who heard her.
"Come along and see my mother," he urged, with solicitude. "She always has a prime welcome for visitors, mother has."