"Would you be for following a herdsman who could lead you to no fold? This man is dead, Ynys; and it is well that you brought me here to-day. That is a good thing, and for sure God willed it. Out of this all our new happiness may come. For now we know what is this mysterious shadow that has darkened our lives ever since we came to Rona. Now we have knowledge that it was no mere phantom I saw upon the hillside; and now also we know that he who told you these strange, wild things of which you speak was no prophet with a message from the world of the spirit, but a man wrought to madness, a man who for all these years had lived his lonely, secretive life upon the hills, or among these caves of the sea. Come, then, dear, and let us go hence. Sure, at the last, it is well that we have found this way. Come, Ynys, we will go now and never come here again."
He looked eagerly for her assenting eyes. With pain in his heart, however, he saw that the dream—the strange, inexplicable fantasy—had not yet gone out of them. With a sigh, he entered the boat and took her hand.
"Let us go," she said, and that was all.
Slowly Alan oared the boat across the shadowy gulf of the cave, along the narrow passage which led therefrom, and out into the pale green gloom of the arched arcade wherein the sight and sound of the sea made a music in his ears.
But the short November day was already passing to its end. All the sea westward was aflame with gold and crimson light, and in the great dome of the sky a wonderful radiance lifted above the paleness of the clouds whose pinnacled and bastioned heights towered in the south-west.
A faint wind blew eastwardly; so, raising the sail, Alan made it fast and then sat down beside Ynys. But she, rising, moved along the boat to the mast, and leaned there with her face against the setting sun.
Idly they drifted onward. Deep silence prevailed betwixt them; deep silence was all about them, save for the endless, inarticulate murmur of the sea, the splash of low waves against the rocks of Rona, and the sigh of the surf at the base of the basalt precipices.
And this was their homeward sailing on that day of revelation; Ynys, with her back against the mast, and her face irradiated by the light of the setting sun; he, steering, with his face in shadow.
On a night of rain and amid the rumor of tempest, three weeks later, Ynys heard the Laughter of the King, when the child who was to be the bearer of so fair a destiny lay by her side, white and chill as the foam thrown up for a brief while upon the rocks by the unheeding sea.