n we are married I will
try to make him perfect."

CHAPTER XVII

GWENDA AT GARTHOWEN

On the slope of the moor, where the autumn sun was burnishing the furze
and purpling the heather, Morva sat knitting, her nimble fingers outrun
by her busy thoughts.

She was sitting half way up the moor, an old cloak wrapped round her
and its hood drawn over her head, for the wind was keen, blowing fresh
from the bright blue bay, which stretched before her to the hazy
horizon. Her eyes gazed absently over its azure surface, flecked with
white, as though with scattered snowflakes, and dotted here and there
with the grey sails of the boats which the herring fishery called out
from their moorings under the cliffs. She sat at the edge of a
rush-bordered pool in the peaty bog, occasionally bending over it to
look at her own image reflected on its glassy surface. Between the
folds of the old cloak glistened the necklace of shells which Gethin
had given her. It was her twentieth birthday, so she seized the excuse
for wearing the precious ornament which generally lay locked in its
painted casket on the shelf at her bed head. It was not at herself she
gazed, but the ever-changing gleam of the shells was irresistible. How
well she remembered that evening when in the moonlight under the elder
tree at Garthowen, Gethin had held them out to her, with a dawning love
in his eyes, and her heart had bounded towards him with that strong
impulse, which alas! she now knew was love!--love that permeated her
whole being, that drew her thoughts away on the wings of the wind, over
the restless sea, away, away, to distant lands and foreign ports.
Where did he roam? What foreign shores did his footsteps tread? In
what strange lands was he wandering? far from his home, far from the
hearts that loved him and longed for his return! The swallows flew in
fluttering companies over the moor, beginning to congregate for their
departure across the seas. Oh! that she could borrow their wings, and
fly with them across that sad dividing ocean, and, finding Gethin,
could flutter down to him and shelter on his breast, and twitter to him
such a song of love and home that he should understand and turn his
steps once more towards the old country!

Will never troubled her now, never asked her to meet him behind the
broom bushes. He had ceased to love her, she knew, and although he had
never freed her from her promise, Morva had too much common sense to
f