“The stars are coming out again,” said Margaret, looking round; “and what is that glow of light yonder?” There was a white reflection above the eastern horizon where she pointed.
“It must be the moon rising,” he said, and applied a match to his bonfire. A blue tongue of flame curled upwards, an odour of smoke arose, and then a sharp crackling, and a sudden heat, that forced them to stand away. The bush burned fiercely, hissing and crackling as the fibres of the green wood and the pointed needles shrivelled up. By the light of the tawny flames he now saw the weary expression of her face; she must rest somewhere and somehow.
“Quick, Geoffrey! it is going out; throw your hurdles on.”
“On second thoughts I will not burn the hurdles.” Nothing flares so swiftly or sinks so soon as furze; in a few minutes the beacon was out.
“I must rest,” she said, and went back to the trees and sat on a boulder. Opposite, the pale glow in the east shot up into the sky; as it rose it became thinner and diffused. Slowly the waning moon came up over the ridge of a distant hill, whose top was brought out by the light behind it, as a well-defined black line against the sky. Vast shadows swept along and filled the narrow vales—dark as the abyss of space; the slopes that faced eastwards shone with a faint grey. The distorted gibbous disk lifted itself above the edge—red as ruddle and enlarged by the refraction: a giant coppery moon, weird and magical. The forked branches of a tree on the hill stretched upwards across it, like the black arms of some gibbering demon.
“Look round once more,” he said, as the disk cleared the ridge. “Perhaps you may recognise some landmark, and I will run and bring assistance.”
“And leave me here alone!” reproachfully.
“No, I will never leave you.” There was an intense pleasure in feeling how thoroughly she relied upon him. They went outside the copse and looked round. The dim moonlight was even more indefinite than the former mist and starlight. She saw nothing but hills, grey where the moonbeams touched them, black elsewhere; great cavernous coombes; behind them a shadowy plain. Here and there a hawthorn bush, fantastic in the faint light. It seemed as if a lengthened gaze might perhaps distinguish strange shapes flickering to and fro in the mystic waste.
“I see nothing but hills,” she said. “I do not like to look; let us go back to the trees.”
She sat down again on the sunken boulder, where only a part of the space around and its spectral shadows was visible.