n. There was no answer, and a bird flew out
above his head.

He cried no more there, but out he ran into the vacant moor and loudly
he called to the night, "Nan! Nan!" till his voice seemed to himself
some terrific chant of long-dead peoples come first to this strange land
and crying for each other in the wilderness where they were lost.

"Nan! Nan!" he cried, sometimes entreating, sometimes peremptory, as
though she might be hiding in the dark in some childish caprice. "Nan!
Nan!" he called plaintively, and he called sharply too and loudly, the
possessor. The sides of Ben Bhreac woke to answer "Anan," as people
reply in dreams; and the stars of heaven in their little garden over
the hill had no interest whatever in his crying; they hung out cool and
imperturbable, and the wind wailed, but not for his anxieties, on the
reeds of Little Fox.

Then he pressed his hand upon his heart to still its uproar and strained
his ears to listen. No sound of a girl's voice, no foot upon the
heather. He could scarcely believe his senses. In his mind, as he
approached the house she had seemed as essential a part of it as the sky
was portion of the universe, and here she was gone!

"After all, she may be in the house asleep," he thought, cheating
himself into a moment's comfort; and back he went again. He listened at
the threshold for a breath: no sound came to him; the fire was all out,
the air was the air of a dungeon. "Nan!" he called timidly. He got no
reply.

Timidly now he stepped into that chamber that had been sacred to him
before--the holy of holies--and fumbled with a steel. The sparks showed
him his hands trembling, but at first he did not dare to look behind him
for fears intangible. The dried heather stems caught the flame of the
tinder; there was but a handful of them; they flared up in a moment's
red glare on the interior, then died out crackling. It was enough to
show him the place was empty. It showed him, too, his lantern, the poor
companion of his adventure, lying on the floor as if it had been tumbled
there in some hasty escape; he picked it up and lit it, the gleam
lighting a ghastly face. And then he went out again, not knowing why or
what he might do there, but bound to be moving and away from that empty
shell where had been his kernel untasted. The wind had risen and was
rising higher still. On Little Fox side he stood, a ludicrous object,
with the pin-points of light pricking the darkness. He was there the