, shady straw-hat upon the red-brown hair, and drew loose
chamois-leather gloves over the slim white exquisite hands that were,
perhaps her greatest beauty, chose a walking-stick from the hall-rack, ran
down the steep cliff pathway, crossed the spidery, red-rusted iron
foot-bridge that spanned the railway-line, descended upon the farther side
of the wood of chestnut and larch that made green shadows at the base of
the cliff, and was upon the sand-dunes, walking with the free, undulating
gait she had acquired from the Mother, towards the restless line of white
breakers that rose and fell a mile away.

She was happy. A glorious secret kept her bosom-company; a new hope gave
her strength. She drank in long draughts of the strong, salt, fragrant
air, and as it filled her lungs, knew her soul brimmed with fresh delight
in the beauty of the world. And a renewed and quickened sense of the joy
of life made music of the beating of her pulses and the throbbing of her
heart.

She was a child of the wild veld, but none the less a daughter of this
sea-girt Britain: the blue, restless waves beyond that line of white
frothing breakers washed the shores of the Mother's beloved green island,
Emerald Airinn, set in silver foam. A few miles, St. George's Channel
spanned--then straight as the crow flies over Wicklow, Queen's County,
King's County, taking Galway at the acute angle of the wild mallard's
flight; and there would be the chained lakes and winding silver rivers,
the grey-green mountains and the beetling cliffs, the dreamy valleys and
wild glens of Connemara, with the ancient towers of Castleclare rising
from its mossed lawns studded with immemorial oaks. And Loch Kilbawne
among the wild highlands, and Lochs Innsa and Barre, and Ballybarron
Harbour, with its Titanic breakwater, and three beacons, and the dun-brown
islands bidden in their veil of surf-edged spindrift, shaken by the voices
of hidden waters roaring in their secret caves.

A faint smile played about her sensitive lips. Her golden eyes dreamed as
she walked on swiftly, a slender figure dressed in a plain skirt of rough
grey-blue, and a loose-sleeved blouse of thick white silk, her slight
waist belted with a silver-mounted lizard-skin girdle, a pleasant tinkle
of silver chatelaine appendages accompanying her steps.

And those steps were to her no longer uncompanioned. It was as though the
Mother were living, so enfolding and close was the sense of her presence
to-day