d thenceforward
the united party went on together. At last they struck the Geinig; and
here a rude track took them away from the valley of the Aivron
altogether, into a solitary land of moor and rock.

It was a still and rather louring morning; but yet he did not perceive
any gloom in it at all; nay, there was rather a tender and wistful
beauty up in this lonely wilderness he was entering. The heavy masses of
cloud hung low and brooding over the purple hills; the heavens seemed to
be in close communion with the murmuring streams in these otherwise
voiceless solitudes; the long undulations were not darkly stained, they
only lay under a soft, transparent shadow. Even among the grays and
purple-grays of the sky there was here and there a mild sheen of silver;
and now and again a pale radiance would begin to tell upon an uprising
slope, until something almost like sunlight shone there, glorifying the
lichened rocks and the crimson heather. This was one of the days that
Honnor Cunyngham loved; and he, too, had got to appreciate their sombre
beauty, the brooding calm, the gracious silence, when he went with her
on her fishing expeditions into the wilds. And here was her favorite
Geinig--sometimes with tawny masses boiling down between the boulders,
sometimes sweeping in a black-brown current round a sudden curve, and
sometimes racing over silver-gray shallows; but always with this
continuous murmur that seemed to offer a kind of companionship where
there was no other sound or sign of life. And would she be up here later
on? he asked himself, with a curious kind of interest. Would she have a
thought for the small party that had passed in the early morning and
disappeared into the remote and secret fastnesses among those lonely
hills? Might she linger on in the evening, in the hope of finding them
coming home again--perchance with joyful news? For, after all, this
lucky sixpence had buoyed up his spirits; he was not so entirely certain
he would miss, if anything like a fair chance presented itself; and he
knew that if that chance did offer, he would bring all that was in him
to bear on the controlling of his nerves--he would not breathe--his life
would be concentrated on the small cleft of the rifle--if his heart
cracked in twain the instant after the trigger was pulled.

But these vague and anxious speculations were soon to be discarded for
the immediate interests of the moment. They were getting near to the
ground--after a s