'You would need to be dressed in feathers like the eagles if you did,' replied Silva; 'and if one had eyes like theirs, I dare say one would never feel lonely. One would see so much.'
'I wonder,' said Maia—and then she stopped.
'What were you going to say?' asked Rollo.
Maia's eyes looked far over the plain as if, like the eagles, they would pierce the distance.
'It was from there we came,' she said. 'I wonder if it will be from there that father will come to take us away. Do you think that the eagles will know when he is coming? do you think they will see him from very far off?'
Silva looked over the plain without speaking, and into her dark eyes there crept something that was not in Maia's blue ones.
'Maia,' exclaimed Rollo reproachfully, 'Silva is crying. She doesn't like you to talk of us going away.'
In an instant Maia's arms were round Silva's neck.
'Don't cry, Silva—you mustn't,' she said. 'When we go away you and Waldo shall come too—we will ask our father, won't we, Rollo?'
'And godmother?' said Silva, smiling again. 'What would she say? We are her children, Maia, and the children of the forest. We should not be fit to live as you do in the great world of men out away there. No; we can always love each other, and perhaps you and Rollo will come away out of the world sometimes to see us—but we must stay in our own country.'