nto the darkness under
the pale stars--out into the night to the open moor, his grief so
burdening that he felt as if the whole world had gone from his
reckoning.

"Oh, my poor Mysie," he groaned. "It was all a horrible mistake," and
the darkness came down in thick heavy folds as if the whole world were
mourning for the loss of the young girl's soul, but it brought no
comfort to him.

CHAPTER XXIV

A CALL FOR HELP

It was a quiet night in early April, full of the hush which seems to
gather all the creative forces together, before the wild outburst of
prodigal creation begins in wild flower and weed and moorland grasses,
and Robert Sinclair, who had walked and tramped over the moors for
hours, until he was nearly exhausted, his heart torn and his mind in an
agony of suffering, sat down upon a little hillock, his elbows on his
knees and his hands against his cheeks.

The moor-birds screamed and circled in restless flight around him. They
were plainly protesting against his intrusion into their domain. They
shrilled and dived in their flight, almost touching the bent head, with
swooping wing, to rise again, cleaving the air and sheering round again;
but still the lonely figure sat looking into darkness, becoming numbed
with cold, and all unconscious of the passage of time.

Gradually the cold began to tell upon him, and he started to his feet,
plodding up the hill, through the soft mossy yielding soil. Back again
he came after a time, his limbs aching with the long night's tramping;
but yet he never thought of going home or turning towards the village.

"Oh, Mysie!" he groaned again and again, and all night long only these
two words escaped his lips. They came in a low sad tone, like the wind
coming through far-off trees; but they were vibrant with suffering, and
only the moor-birds cried in answer.

"Oh, Mysie!" and the winds sighed it again and again, as they came
wandering down out of the stillness between the hills, to pass on into
the silence of the night again, like lost souls wandering through an
uncreative world, proclaiming to other spheres the doom that had settled
upon earth.

"Oh, Mysie!" groaned a moorland brook close by, which grumbled at some
obstruction in its pathway, and then sighed over its mossy bed, like a
tired child emerging exhausted from a long fever, to fall asleep as
deeply as if the seal of death had been planted upon the little lips.
Occasionally he shifted his position, as