Always his thoughts were full of Mysie and the
raging passion in his blood for her gave him no rest. He loved to trace
her name linked with his own, and then to obliterate it again, in case
anyone would see it. All day his thoughts were of her; and her sweet,
shy smile that day of the games was nursed in memory till it grew to be
a solace to his heart and its hunger.
He saw likenesses to her in everything, and even the call of the
moor-birds awakened some memory of an incident of childhood, when Mysie
and he had, with other children, played together on the moors. Even the
very words which she had spoken, or the way she had acted, or how she
had looked, in cheap cotton frock and pinafore, were recalled by a
familiar cry, or by the sudden discovery of a bog-flower in bloom.
It was a glorious afternoon in late July. The hum of insect life seemed
to flood the whole moor; the scent of mown hay and wild thyme, and late
hawthorn blossom from the trees on the edge of the moor, was heavy in
the air, and the sun was very hot, and still high in the heavens. The
hills that bordered the moor drowsed and brooded, like ancient gods,
clothed in a lordly radiance that was slowly consuming them as they
meditated upon their coming oblivion.
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