hen they had started again, she thought: If I could get
him to sleep--the sea will comfort him! But his eyes were staring,
wide-open. She feigned sleep herself; letting her head slip a little to
one side, causing small sounds of breathing to escape. The whirring of
the wheels, the moaning of the cab joints, the dark trees slipping by,
the scent of the wet fern drifting in, all these must surely help! And
presently she felt that he was indeed slipping into darkness--and
then-she felt nothing.

When she awoke from the sleep into which she had seen Miltoun fall, the
cab was slowly mounting a steep hill, above which the moon had risen.
The air smelled strong and sweet, as though it had passed over leagues of
grass.

"The Downs!" she thought; "I must have been asleep!"

In sudden terror, she looked round for Miltoun. But he was still there,
exactly as before, leaning back rigid in his corner of the cab, with
staring eyes, and no other signs of life. And still only half awake,
like a great warm sleepy child startled out of too deep slumber, she
clutched, and clung to him. The thought that he had been sitting like
that, with his spirit far away, all the time that she had been betraying
her watch in sleep, was dreadful. But to her embrace there was no
response, and awake indeed now, ashamed, sore, Barbara released him, and
turned her face to the air.

Out there, two thin, dense-black, long clouds, shaped like the wings of a
hawk, had joined themselves together, so that nothing of the moon showed
but a living brightness imprisoned, like the eyes and life of a bird,
between those swift sweeps of darkness. This great uncanny spirit,
brooding malevolent over the high leagues of moon-wan grass, seemed
waiting to swoop, and pluck up in its talons, and devour, all that
intruded on the wild loneness of these far-up plains of freedom. Barbara
almost expected to hear coming from it the lost whistle of the buzzard
hawks. And her dream came back to her. Where were her wings-the wings
that in sleep had borne her to the stars; the wings that would never lift
her--waking--from the ground? Where too were Miltoun's wings? She
crouched back into her corner; a tear stole up and trickled out between
her closed lids-another and another followed. Faster and faster they
came. Then she felt Miltoun's arm round her, and heard him say: "Don't
cry, Babs!" Instinct telling her what to do, she laid her head against
his chest, and sobbe