"Only in where?" said Gwen. "Where is Dolly frightened of sheep?"
"In the street, because they run on the pavement, and the dog runs over their backs.... There are very few sheep here, compared to what we had in the colony.... Our shepherds were very good men, but all had their numbers from the Governor ... they had all been convicted ... but not of doing anything wrong...."
Oh dear!—what a mistake Gwen had made about those sheep! But how could she have known? She knew so little about the colony—had even asked General Rawnsley, when they were talking of Van Diemen's Land, if he knew where "Tasmania" was! She tried to head off the pastoral convicts—the cancelled men, who had become numbers. "When Dolly comes, she will see the mill too. And it will go round and round by then." She clung in a sort of desperation to Dolly and Dave, having tested their power as talismans to drive away the black spectres that hung about.
But the mill was as Scylla to their Charybidis. "Phoebe dearest!" said old Maisie suddenly, "when did father die?"
"When did our father die?" said Granny Marrable. "Nigh upon forty-six years ago. Yes—forty-six."
"How can that be?—forty-six—forty-six!" The words were shadowily spoken, as by a speaker too weary to question them, yet dissatisfied. "How can my father have died then? That was when my sister died, and my little girl I left behind."
"Oh, how I wish she could sleep!" Gwen exclaimed under her breath. Granny Marrable said:—"She will sleep, my lady, before very long." She said it with such a quiet self-command, that Gwen accepted the obvious meaning that the sleeper would sleep again, as before. Perhaps nothing else was meant.
There had been a time, just after she first came to the strange truth of her surroundings, when she could follow and connect the sequence of events. Now the Past and the Present fell away by turns, either looming large and excluding the view of the other alternately. But, that Phoebe and Ruth were there, beside her, was the fact that kept the strongest hold of her mind.
Eleven o'clock. Granny Marrable had been right, and old Maisie had slept again, or seemed to sleep, after some dutiful useless attempts to head off Death by trivialities of nourishment. The clock-hand, intent upon its second, oblivious of its predecessors, incredulous of those to come, was near halfway to midnight when Ruth Thrale, rising from beside her mother, came to her fellow-watchers in the front-room and said:—"I think she moved."