ckle Roy. A dread seized him that these might
be yeomen. Since he had come within reach of home, since he had seen and
heard the sea, since he had breathed the familiar salt-laden air, his
courage had left him. He felt a very coward, desperately anxious not to
be caught and dragged back again to the horror of death. He wanted to
live now that he was back at home and almost within reach of Una.
He eyed the distant figures anxiously, and then crept back and lay
trembling in his hollow among his ordered snail-shells and the flowers,
already withered, which he had plucked and planted in the sand.

At last the sun set. Neal waited for an hour while the June twilight
slowly faded. He watched the sandhills round his lair turn from bright
yellow to grey, watched them while they seemed in the fading light to
grow loftier, and assume a weird majesty which was not their's in
the daytime. The objects near at hand, the faded flowers, and the
snail-shells, and the rods of woven bent, lost their bright colours and
became almost invisible. The eternal roaring of the sea seemed to be
subdued, as if even it felt awed by the stillness of the June night.
The sand on which he lay was damped with dew. Only the sharp cry of the
corncrake broke the solemnity of the night.

He rose, and, peering anxiously before him as each fresh stretch of his
way became visible, crossed the sandhills. Avoiding the stepping-stones
and the regular crossing-place, he waded through the brook which ran
gurgling between the sandhills and the rough track beyond them. He
crossed it, and, skirting the rear of a cottage, reached the top of the
Runkerry cliffs. Far below him the sea rushed, white-lipped, against the
rocks. The tide was almost full. The scene was as it had been ten days
ago, ten years ago, a whole lifetime ago, when he walked this same way
with Donald Ward. Still keeping close to the sea, he avoided the high
road near the Causeway, plodded along the stony track past the Rocking
Stone and the Wishing Well, climbed the Shepherd's Path, and once more
walked along the verge of the cliff above Port na Spaniard and the Horse
Shoe Bay and Pleaskin Head. He reached Port Moon, and saw far below
him the glimmer of a light in the rude shelter where fishermen lodge in
summer time. Avoiding the farmhouse near him on his right, and the lane
which led past it to the high road, he went on, clinging close to the
sea as if for safety. He rested a while in the shelter of t