Suddenly the deer leaped in an ecstasy of terror and went crashing away into obscurity.  But Malcourt lay very, very still.

His hat was off; the cliff breeze played with his dark curly hair, lifting it at the temples, stirring the one obstinate strand that never lay quite flat on the crown of his head.

A moment later the sun set.

CHAPTER XXVIII

HAMIL IS SILENT

Late in the autumn his aunt wrote Hamil from Sapphire Springs: 

“There seems to be a favourable change in Shiela.  Her aversion to people is certainly modified.  Yesterday on my way to the hot springs I met her with her trained nurse, Miss Lester, face to face, and of course meant to pass on as usual, apparently without seeing her; but to my surprise she turned and spoke my name very quietly; and I said, as though we had parted the day before—­’I hope you are better’; and she said, ’I think I am’—­very slowly and precisely like a person who strives to speak correctly in a foreign tongue.  Garry, dear, it was too pathetic; she is so changed—­beautiful, even more beautiful than before; but the last childish softness has fled from the delicate and almost undecided features you remember, and her face has settled into a nobler mould.  Do you recollect in the Munich Museum an antique marble, by some unknown Greek sculptor, called ‘Head of a Young Amazon’?  You must recall it because you have spoken to me of its noble and almost immortal loveliness.  Dear, it resembles Shiela as she is now—­with that mysterious and almost imperceptible hint of sorrow in the tenderly youthful dignity of the features.

“We exchanged only the words I have written you; she passed her way leaning on Miss Lester’s arm; I went for a mud bath as a precaution to our inherited enemy.  If rheumatism gets me at last it will not be the fault of your aged and timorous aunt.

“So that was all, yesterday.  But to-day as I was standing on the leafy path above the bath-houses, listening to the chattering of some excited birds recently arrived from the North in the first batch of migrants, Miss Lester came up to me and said that Shiela would like to see me, and that the doctors said there was no harm in her talking to anybody if she desired to do so.

   “So I took my book to a rustic seat under the trees, and
   presently our little Shiela came by, leaning on Miss Lester’s
   arm; and Miss Lester walked on, leaving her seated beside me.

   “For quite five minutes she neither spoke nor even looked at me,
   and I was very careful to leave the quiet unbroken.

“The noise of the birds—­they were not singing, only chattering to each other about their trip—­seemed to attract her notice, and she laid her hand on mine to direct my attention.  Her hand remained there—­she has the same soft little hands, as dazzlingly white as ever, only thinner.

   “She said, not looking at me:  ’I have been ill.  You understand
   that.’