Wogan went from the parlour and climbed out of the house by the
rope-ladder. He left it hanging at the window and walked up the
glimmering road, a ribbon of ghostly white between dim hills. It was
then about half-past twelve of the night, and not a feather of cloud
stained the perfection of the sky. It curved above his head spangled
like a fair lady's fan, and unfathomably blue like Clementina's eyes
when her heart stirred in their depths. He reached the little footway
and turned into the upward cleft of the hills. He walked now into the
thick night of a close-grown clump of dwarf-oaks, which weaved so dense
a thatch above his head that he knocked against the boles. The trees
thinned, he crossed here and there a dimpled lawn in the pure starshine,
he traversed a sparse grove of larches in the dreamy twilight, he came
out again upon the grassy lip of a mountain torrent which henceforth
kept him company, and which, speaking with many voices, seemed a friend
trying to catch his mood. For here it leaped over an edge of rock, and
here in a tiny waterfall, and splashed into a pellucid pool, and the
reverberating noise filled the dell with a majestic din; there it ran
smoothly kissing its banks with a murmur of contentment, embosoming the
stars; beyond, it chafed hoarsely between narrow walls; and again half a
mile higher up it sang on shallows and evaded the stones with a tinkling
laugh. But Wogan was deaf to the voices; he mounted higher, the trees
ceased, he came into a desolate country of boulders; and the higher he
ascended, the more heavily he walked. He stopped and washed his face and
hands clean of blood-stains in the stream. Above him and not very far
away was the lonely hut.