The night seemed far severed from the day which had heralded it as if by long years: never more could she rise in the daybreak quite the same child who had leaped to the lattice, and laughed at the sunrise on the sea, that morning.
She did not reason on the change in her, nor understand it, but she felt it.
When the little velvet-hided calf has been branded in the stock-yard with the cruel iron, never more (though turned loose again) will it frolic the same in the prairie grass unwitting of pain or ill.
She took her way slowly over the head of the cliff across the breadth of pasture where a few days before she had led Loswa. There was a dusky crouching figure waiting in the shadow of the orange-boughs; it was that of old Catherine the servant, who sprang towards her and gripped her arm with both hands.
'He is come home!' she said in a loud, terrified whisper.
'My grandfather!'
Bold though she was by nature, her lips and cheeks grow cold and her heart stood still.
'Who else!' cried the old woman roughly. 'For who else would I keep out of my bed at such an hour to watch for you? Where have you been all the while?'
'I have been with the lady.'