Clementina

Wogan went from the parlour and climbed out of the house by the

rope-ladder. He left it hanging at the window and walked up the

glimmering road, a ribbon of ghostly white between dim hills. It was

then about half-past twelve of the night, and not a feather of cloud

stained the perfection of the sky. It curved above his head spangled

like a fair lady's fan, and unfathomably blue like Clementina's eyes

when her heart stirred in their depths. He reached the little footway

and turned into the upward cleft of the hills. He walked now into the

thick night of a close-grown clump of dwarf-oaks, which weaved so dense

a thatch above his head that he knocked against the boles. The trees

thinned, he crossed here and there a dimpled lawn in the pure starshine,

he traversed a sparse grove of larches in the dreamy twilight, he came

out again upon the grassy lip of a mountain torrent which henceforth

kept him company, and which, speaking with many voices, seemed a friend

trying to catch his mood. For here it leaped over an edge of rock, and

here in a tiny waterfall, and splashed into a pellucid pool, and the

reverberating noise filled the dell with a majestic din; there it ran

smoothly kissing its banks with a murmur of contentment, embosoming the

stars; beyond, it chafed hoarsely between narrow walls; and again half a

mile higher up it sang on shallows and evaded the stones with a tinkling

laugh. But Wogan was deaf to the voices; he mounted higher, the trees

ceased, he came into a desolate country of boulders; and the higher he

ascended, the more heavily he walked. He stopped and washed his face and

hands clean of blood-stains in the stream. Above him and not very far

away was the lonely hut.

He came upon it quite suddenly. For the path climbed steeply at the

back, and slipping from the mouth of a narrow gully he stood upon the

edge of a small plateau in the centre of which stood the cabin, a little

house of pinewood built with some decoration and elegance. One unglazed

window was now unshuttered, and the light from a lantern streamed out of

it in a yellow fan, marking the segment of a circle upon the rough rocky

ground and giving to the dusk of the starshine a sparkle of gold.

Through the window Wogan could see into the room. It was furnished

simply, but with an eye to comfort. He saw too the girl he had dared to

bear off from the thick of a hostile town. She was lying upon a couch,

her head resting upon her folded arms. She was asleep, and in a place

most solitary. Behind the cabin rose a black forest of pines, pricking

the sky with their black spires, and in front of it the ground fell

sharply to the valley, in which no light gleamed; beyond the valley rose

the dim hills again. Nor was there any sound except the torrent. The

air at this height was keen and fresh with a smell of primeval earth.

Wogan hitched his cloak about his throat, and his boots rang upon the

rock. The Princess raised her head; Wogan walked to the door and stood

for a little with his hand upon the latch. He lifted it and entered.

Clementina looked at him for a moment, and curiously. She had no

questions as to how his struggle with the Governor of Trent's emissaries

had fared. Wogan could understand by some unspoken sympathy that that

matter had no place in her thoughts. She stood up in an attitude of

expectation.