How oppressive the silence was! How wild and dreary the scene around him!
Half Breton himself by birth, his mother's native land was calling to him with that strange, mysterious voice which can be heard only by Celtic ears.
A strange, indefinable longing had stirred within him as he strode through the narrow streets of St. Malo; it was quickening now into stronger life as he listened to the moaning of the wind as it swept across from the coast and over the purple moorland.
A minor note it struck; yet who shall deny that truest sweetness lingers in that key?
Nature calling to her child, not through the beautiful but the sorrowful.
Grey crags, heather-crowned landes, lines of yellow sand-dunes, the fading light of an autumn evening, and through all, above all, the melancholy charm which allures rather than repels, crying aloud of sorrow, yet singing its wild music as melodiously as any Lorelei on charmed rock.
Not that Morice Conyers heard it all; only vaguely it struck his heart, reproaching him in that he, a son of Brittany, came, as a thief in the night, to betray his land and add to her burden of lament.
And he was alone.
That was the reason why such foolish ghosts pursued him. Jack Denningham would have killed them with a sneer, Trouet would have stabbed them with a mocking witticism, Berrington have drowned them with a jolly laugh and long pull at his brandy-flask.
Wise fellows, those comrades of his; but why had they left him thus in the lurch?