"Mona couldn't bear to see it caged, and would have me put it back. Don't you remember I clambered up to the nest, and put the bird in again? You were down on the shore, thinking sure I would tumble over the Head, and Mona—Mona—"
Dan glanced afresh into Ewan's face, and its look of terror seemed to stupefy him; still he made shift to go on with his dream in an abashed sort of way:
"My gough! If I didn't dream it all as fresh, as fresh, and the fight in the air, and the screams when I put the old bird in the nest—the young ones had forgotten it clean, and they tumbled it out, and set on it terrible, and drove it away—and then the poor old thing on the rocks sitting by itself as lonesome as lonesome—and little Mona crying and crying down below, and her long hair rip-rip-rippling in the wind, and—and—"
Dan had got to his feet, and then seated himself on a stool as he rambled on with the story of his dream. But once again his shifty eyes came back to Ewan's face, and he stopped short.
"My God, what is it?" he cried.
Now Ewan, standing there with a thousand vague forms floating in his brain, had heard little of what Dan had said, but he had noted his confused manner, and had taken this story of the dream as a feeble device to hide the momentary discomfiture.
"What does it mean?" he said. "It means that this island is not large enough to hold both you and me."
"What?"
"It means that you must go away."
"Away!"