"It is too late, uncle," she repeated. "Too late, because the opportunity is lost; too late, because if I could bring it back, I dare not go near the Myrtle Room again. My last hope was to change the hiding-place of the letter—and that last hope I have given up. I have only one object in life left now; you may help me in it; but I can not tell you how unless you come on with me at once—unless you say nothing more about going back to Porthgenna Tower."
Uncle Joseph began to expostulate. His niece stopped him in the middle of a sentence, by touching him on the shoulder and pointing to a particular spot on the darkening slope of the moor below them.
"Look!" she said, "there is somebody on the path behind us. Is it a boy or a man?"
Uncle Joseph looked through the fading light, and saw a figure at some little distance. It seemed like the figure of a boy, and he was apparently engaged in digging on the moor.
"Let us turn round, and go on at once," pleaded Sarah, before the old man could answer her. "I can't say what I want to say to you, uncle, until we are safe under shelter at the inn."
They went on until they reached the highest ground on the moor. There they stopped, and looked back again. The rest of their way lay down hill; and the spot on which they stood was the last point from which a view could be obtained of Porthgenna Tower.
"We have lost sight of the boy," said Uncle Joseph, looking over the ground below them.
Sarah's younger and sharper eyes bore witness to the truth of her uncle's words—the view over the moor was lonely now, in every direction, as far as she could see. Before going on again, she moved a little away from the old man, and looked at the tower of the ancient house, rising heavy and black in the dim light, with the dark sea background stretching behind it like a wall. "Never again!" she whispered to herself. "Never, never, never again!" Her eyes wandered away to the church, and to the cemetery inclosure by its side, barely distinguishable now in the shadows of the coming night. "Wait for me a little longer," she said, looking toward the burial-ground with straining eyes, and pressing her hand on her bosom over the place where the book of Hymns lay hid. "My wanderings are nearly at an end; the day for my coming home again is not far off!"
The tears filled her eyes and shut out the view. She rejoined her uncle, and, taking his arm again, drew him rapidly a few steps along the downward path—then checked herself, as if struck by a sudden suspicion, and walked back a few paces to the highest ridge of the ground. "I am not sure," she said, replying to her companion's look of surprise—"I am not sure whether we have seen the last yet of that boy who was differing on the moor."
As the words passed her lips, a figure stole out from behind one of the large fragments of granite rock which were scattered over the waste on all sides of them. It was once more the figure of the boy, and again he began to dig, without the slightest apparent reason, on the barren ground at his feet.