she had thought only of him. The shepherds did not notice her; they
were quarrelling violently in dispute over what had been lost and
won, thrusting their fingers in each other's faces, and defiling the
fair calm of the day with filthy oaths.

The girl shrank away into the heather with the silent swiftness of a
hare; now that she had lost the stimulus of indignant pity she was
afraid of these brutes; if the whim entered into them they would be
as brutal to her as to their flock.

Out of fear of them she did not descend at once to the river, but
pushed her way through the sweet-smelling, bee-haunted, cross-leaved
heaths; she could hear the sound of the water on her right all the
time as she went. She knew little of this country, but she had seen
the Edera, and had crossed it farther up its course on one of its
rough tree-bridges.

When, as well as she could judge, she had got half a mile away from
the scene of the rams' combat, she changed her course and went to the
right, directed by the murmur of the river. It was slow walking
through the heath and gorse which grew above her head, and were
closely woven together, but in time she reached shelving ground, and
heard the song of the river louder on her ear. The heath ceased to
grow within a few yards of the stream and was replaced by various
water plants and acacia thickets; she slid down the banks between the
stems and alighted on her bare feet where the sand was soft and the
water-dock grew thick. She looked up and down the water; there was no
one in sight, nothing but the banks rosehued with the bloom of the
heather, and, beyond the opposite shore, in the distance, the tender
amethystine hues of the mountains. The water was generally low,