"Good morrow, Mistress Dorothy," he said. "I suppose thy father waits at the house? I will go to him at once."
He turned from the stile; but on his arm there was the flutter of a hand like to the flutter of a bird's wing, and he stopped. He turned to look at the river again, and the maiden's eyes followed his. There was silence whilst a man might have told ten score.
"The wings of the gulls flash like silver in the sunshine," ventured Dorothy.
"So I have thought."
A pause.
"Thou art leaving us to-morrow."
"That is why I have been watching the gulls for near an hour."
"I don't understand."
"Paignton Rob says that these white gulls are found all the world over. I shall see them a thousand leagues away—screaming round the ship; massing in white armies on the New World cliffs; fishing in the rivers. My last vision of home must have white gulls in it. Away yonder they will be fairy birds to me, calling up pictures of my ancestral homestead along Severn side. The forests there will not recall the forest here. How shall their stifling heat and towering palms, their gaudy birds and flowers, their roaring beasts and loathly reptiles, remind one of the cool, sweet glades, the scented bracken, the gnarled oaks, the leaping deer, and sweet-throated songsters of home? 'Tis the vision of the river, the tide, and the wheeling gulls that I shall see again in the land of 'El Dorado.'"
There was a sadness and pathos in the forester's voice that went straight to the heart of the forest maiden. The hand was on his arm again, fluttering, trembling. "I have been very wicked!" The fluty notes of a sweet voice were broken.