John Willie was silent. Only a week before he had left an evening party at the "Imperial" to find the sun already burning a hole in the edge of Mynedd Mawr.
"And how much longer holiday have you?" John Willie asked presently.
"Six days," answered the girl; and again the numeral was accompanied by a slight gesture of her fingers.
"And then you go back to Liverpool?"
Complete silence was all the answer he had to that question.
Then, suddenly, Ynys moved. She stood up. For the first time her seaweed-coloured eyes looked straight into John Willie's.
"You left that place early. You will be hungry. I caught some fis-s—brithyll. I think she cooked now."
She disappeared round the corner of the hut.
John Willie would have liked to ask her why she had put on the black dress and the black shoes, but something seemed to whisper to him not to do so. No doubt she had caught the trout with her hand, in one of the pools of a stream that slid and chattered under fern down the side of Delyn, and he feared that did he approach her too suddenly even by words she might be off, even as those trout would have vanished in a flash at the least disturbance of the water by her hand. She had cooked them on the wood; she had also made a cake of flour and water and no salt; and she served the fish in a tin platter by the little clearing she had made for the hearth. He sat now, and she stood; she brought also a mug of milk, from the surface of which she took a tiny caterpillar with the tip of a frond; and when he had eaten she cleaned the platter by scouring it with a handful of fern-rot and then setting it in a little stream with a stone upon it. Then they stood before one another again, he with his back to the hut, she in front of him, her head always superbly erect, but slowly turning from time to time, while her eyes sought the lake, the line of bracken against the sky where the mountain dropped, and his own eyes, indifferently.
Then, unexpectedly, she asked a question.