“But she is happy too,” said Olver, sitting back on his heels and staring at Calladine.
“He is only a mad boy,” thought Calladine to himself.
Olver sang. He sang an old song, of a girl drowned in the mill-pool because she had lost her lover. The wistful beat of the ballad came back at the end of each verse; it droned on, with mournful persistence. At last Calladine could bear its monotony no longer, and asked, “When will they come?”
Olver shrugged. “Who can tell?”
“Where are they?” Calladine asked.
Olver shrugged again. “Who can tell?”
Calladine remembered how often he had asked Clare, “Where have you been? where have you been?”
He remembered that her answers had never left him any the wiser; he had never come near to what he really wanted to know.
What was it, indeed, that he had really wanted to know? the whole secret of her being, to be explained in a dozen words?