A Sovereign Remedy. Flora Annie Webster Steel
the one over the purchase of which Myfanwy Jones had spent her eloquence. The girl was fair and pretty, but there was about her that marked lack of personal grip on her surroundings, which is so noticeably a result of eleven years and more of strict Board School life; for Alicia's father had marked her out as a pupil teacher when she joined the infant class at three. That had been her ambition till she secured the position at sixteen. Now, at seventeen? At seventeen she blushed and giggled when Myfanwy went on:
"She will sing with Mervyn Pugh, our minister's brother. He is a very good looking young man--just so good looking as you."
To which obvious challenge Ted said something which changed the giggle to a titter; after which he left them, feeling a trifle uncertain as to the result of a reference to Ned.
He found him lying flat on his stomach on the bridge which spanned the stream again a little further down the village, watching, so he said, for even a shadow of a trout in the deep pool below it, a pool which after the long spring drought was only connected to the next one by a mere driblet of water.
"Do?" echoed Ned, looking up at Ted with a twinkle in his eyes. "Excelsior, of course." He waved his pipe towards the "World's Eye," still shrugging high shoulders in the sunshine, and away from Miss Myfanwy Jones, who was standing with Alicia Edwards at the gate of her father's neglected cabbage-patch, buttoning her grey suede gloves with a hook from her silver chatelaine. Her face showed beautiful unconsciousness, though her eyes were on the alert.
Ted hesitated; then from a larger cottage emerged the Reverend Morris Pugh, very spick and span, accompanied by a younger man, evidently by his looks the handsome Mervyn. But the forehead fringe which, after the fashion of young Wales, he wore, was too much for Ted. It looked exactly as if it, also, had been in a curling pin, and feeling vaguely that he would rather not be seen by Ned in its company, he laughed, said "Excelsior, by all means," and led the way, taking off his hat to the charmer as he passed.
Five minutes afterwards, pausing for breath, their first spurt upwards done, the village lay behind them, looking solitary in its close cohesion of cottages and trees.
But from the church, all ivy-mantled amid its wide graveyard, a bell was clanging, and across the grassy mounds dotted with stones, a tall figure in a black cassock and a biretta cap made its way to the vestry door.
"The voice of one crying in the wilderness," remarked Ned, "but he has the bell ringer for congregation, and even Miss Myfanwy Jones will come back to the old churchyard in the end, as her fathers have done, for a penny funeral." Then he laughed. "I shall never forget my Scotch groom-----" he paused. Ted eyed him curiously.
"Well?" he said.
"Oh, nothing! only his criticism on a Welsh funeral was scathing. 'There was no a drop o' whisky, an' they asket me tae pit inter the brod!' Insult on injury!"
So, laughing, they made their way upwards, through black land and bog, through thickets of unimaginably tall brake, and over sparse close-bitten knolls, the sheep flying in disorder from them like a routed army, a stonechat starting from the gorse giving them a momentary thought of game--a thought, no more. And the sunshine mounted with them, chased by the shadow, so that it came upon them by surprise when they reached the summit to see the valley below them veiled in soft purple, and the sun itself not far from setting behind an ominous low level of cloud which lay far out to seaward.
"It has taken longer than I thought," said Ned, stretching himself flat on his stomach, "but there is plenty of time."
"Plenty," echoed Ted, cross-legged like a Turk as he knocked out the ashes of his pipe on a stone.
"We've done the ginger-beer woman, anyhow," remarked Ned after a pause. "She comes there," he pointed to a hovel of stones a few hundred yards further along the plateau, "from the Llangolley side; seven A.M. till seven P.M. during tourist time, the innkeeper said. I wonder how she spends her day?" Then, half to himself, he added, "As if this wasn't meat and drink enough for any one."
It should have been. Far and near, cleft by the purpling shadow from below, the higher hill-tops dissociated themselves from the lower ones, shining rosy, resplendent, giving back the sun its parting gift royally, yet yielding bit by bit to the swift storming uprush of shadow. Another, and another picket of light stood, broke, fled from the foe to some higher refuge, until the last steadfast post of the "World's Eye" remained alone above a world of shadow. Remained alone, a vantage-ground of clear vision, above the wide cup of amethyst hills in which the flood-tide of the sea lay prisoned. So still, so serene, so silvery, lulled to unresisting sleep, as a captive bride might be, by love for the surpassing beauty of those embracing arms. Beyond, over the broad belt of darkening ocean, the sun was just dipping into the bar of cloud, leaving a flame upon the sky.
"We must wait and see the last of it," said he upon the grass suddenly, and the other nodded.
Up and up breathlessly crept the light. On the patch of bracken in the hollow, rallying round a spur of rock, flying for a fresh stand across a shaly slope, so holding its own for an instant against a scarp, driven over the ledge! Ned's hand went out to touch it, but found it behind him; so, turning swiftly he saw the last flicker of sunlight resting, ere final flight, on a yellow placard--
"Ginger beer, 6d."
He started to his feet. "Damn it all!" he cried, "fancy finding that ultimate sixpence here!"
"Sixpence?" queried Ted, rousing himself from a day dream. "Ah! I was thinking of the hundred pounds you left over yonder. It really is d----d rot, you know. What's to hinder my claiming it--well--say to-morrow morning?"
"You've time now if you wish it," assented Ned, "and if the thunderstorm----"
As he spoke there came a quiver of light far out over the hidden sea. It seemed to come from below the threshold of the visible world, like the sudden gleams from the beyond, which, at times, irradiate the mind of man with some infinite message.
Ted turned round startled at the greyness that was fast settling down on hill and sky. "We had better get down as sharp as we can," he cried hastily, taking his bearings. "I think if we try to the left a little we shall get down the rocky part before dusk makes going difficult."
Once again, however, the short cut proved the longer way. The path grew more and more hopeless, until after scrambling down an almost precipitous corrie they found themselves brought up on a jutting spur, by a thirty feet drop as the only onward way.
"It's--it's----" muttered Ted, as he satisfied himself they must go back.
"Worth it," remarked Ned; for the jag of rock on which he stood overhung a wilderness of grey shadow and grey water; the grey hills watching the grey water recede from the shores, leaving behind it still greyer patches of sand that rose roundly from the level reaches of the ebbing tide.
He stood, long after Ted had started upward, watching also, and thinking how like these billowy sand-banks were to a drowned woman's clothes. Some goddess of the earth, surely, lay dead there, her body compassed by the hills.
"I say! Aren't you coming?" came his companion's shout. "We haven't time to lose. Look there!"
A vivid flash of lightning shot beyond the deep bank into the rolling clouds that were coming up swiftly with the rising wind; and, more quickly than one would have expected, a low mutter of thunder caught the crags in monotonous echoes.
"Go on! I'll soon catch you up," shouted Ned in return. And he did so; for there was a lightness, a certain stress of action about his every movement which differentiated him from his companion's more deliberate steadiness.
The wind rose at every gust, and in the fast growing dusk, the sheep sought shelter behind rocks and boulders for the night.
Yet still the downward path could not be found.
"We had best follow the stream yonder," said Ned at last. "It will be longer, but it will take us down eventually, and I don't want to camp out with my pipe in that storm."
The first drop or two of rain emphasised his advice; but it was no easy task to follow it with the mist closing in on