Diccon Dawn shook his head. “We are in haste.”
“I make guess that ye have not the reckoning!” The urchin grinned, threw dry turf and pebble against them and ran away.
Silence came down around them and upon them and within them. The sun was westering, the wold growing purple. The stillness became both fine and vast, a permeating and encirling hush within the hush. Wait—wait—wait! Out of it or into it pushed shadowy sorrows, ancient poignancies. The wold grew peopled with these.
The sun descended. The horizon rose up and took it; a chill and mournful light spread evenly, then withdrew, evenly, slowly. It was dusk. The wold was spectral; all was spectral.
They came to a ring of ancient stones, placed there long ago by long-ago inhabitants of that island and now grown about with whin and thorn and furze. They like the wold, seemed now eternal, now going away, fading away. It was to rest here and sleep here; it was the best place. They lay down. There was silence, and still—faint, faint, in dark lines and pallid silver lines—rose Silver Cross!
Full night, and descending and climbing stars. Then the moon, silver, great, mounting above the clean, sweeping wold-line, silvering the wold, silvering all. Now the air was stillness wholly, and now there came a sighing. Sleep, one must sleep, weary enough with travelling! Yet sleep was not in the wold, with all else that was there.
From above—from above—oh, from above come help!
But it seemed there was only the wold and the air and the moon. Only somehow sorrow.
Deep in the night he perceived that Morgen Fay had risen from where she was lying by a great stone and had moved without the ring. Presently he saw her at some distance, standing in the open wold, very still, regarding the heavens, then moving slowly, walking beneath the moon. A light wave of the wold hid her from his sight. A momentary dart of fear and loneliness went through him, as though the wold had taken her, as though she would go on forever that way and he this. But no; nothing would come of that, nothing would come that way! No—no! They were together, together in this sadness of the wold, strangely together in this separateness, together in the very hauntings and hostilities of the past; together on this wold, this present night—together now—together to-morrow and the next day and the day after, together though walls of the night and the moonlight, or of the day and the sunlight were between their bodies.