Joe turned away.
“Come,” he said slowly, “it’s all over now.”
Hal looked up.
“Ay,” he said, and his voice was heavy and toneless. “It is all over—Joe, all over in one night. Come.”
And they toiled, slipped, and struggled back to their homes again.
The yellow light over the mainland grew brighter and brighter, turned to gold, and then to crimson, and the sun rose once more over an Island as quiet and peaceful as if the Spaniard and his love had never been.
CHAPTER XXVI
ONE evening two or three years later, Big French and Sue, his wife, their young daughter, and little Red Farran, whom they had taken to live with them, sat round the fire in the Ship kitchen.
Gilbot was dead. It was said in the village that he had died singing “Pretty Poll,” and he had left the old Inn to Hal Grame, who proved himself a very able landlord. He had grown very taciturn, however, since the affair of the Spaniard and the girl, which had by this time been almost forgotten by the easy-going Islanders, and he had taken to tobacco, with which Fen de Witt was well able to supply him at a cheap rate, and he sat now in a haze of smoke on the opposite side of the fireplace to French, his pipe in his mouth and his head thrown back as though in earnest contemplation of the rafters.
Joe sat at his elbow drinking ale; they two were as friendly as ever, but Pullen had been known to aver that no word of Anny or the Spaniard had been exchanged between them since that cold September morning long ago when black mud had swallowed the last trace of the affair.