Valmai walked on steadily until she reached the first milestone, and sitting down beside it, she rested awhile, almost hidden by its shadow.

It was not one of the modern insignificant, square-cut, stiff stones, but a solid boulder of granite, one of the many strewn about the moor.

She listened breathlessly to the different sounds that reached her ears, sounds which seemed to awake in the stillness, as she listened.

There was a faint and distant rumbling of wheels in the town behind her, and surely some strains of music, which carried her back in memory to another evening in the past! Down below the cliffs on her left she heard the mysterious whispering of the sea; in the little coppice across the road a wood-pigeon cooed her soft "good-night"; and away in the hay-fields, stretching inland, she heard the corncrakes' grating call; but no human footstep broke the silence of night.

Surely Cardo would have gone to market on such a lovely day! or, who knows?
perhaps he was too sad to care for town or market?
But hark! a footstep on the hard, dry road.
She listened breathlessly as it drew nearer in the gathering grey of the twilight.