He led the way, the others following, through the little Home Valley, as Isla called it, through a narrow rocky pass and over a great brown hill, down into the Dead Valley, which lay beyond. The trustee looked about him with amazement, for, though he had travelled far, he had never seen such a place as this on the earth. He would have asked some questions, but Joe waved him on with feverish eagerness. “Look here!” he said. “She’s been here, and not so long ago. Look at the yew-bed, here!” They looked in wonder at the great cushion of trailing yew that spread thick over the ground under one of the dead cedars. It curled close, a perfumed mat; no queen could have a softer couch. Their eyes sought in vain any print of a light form, though Joe was pointing eagerly. “I tell ye she’s been here!” he repeated. “No place she loved better to sleep in than one of these yew-beds. She mostly never slept within doors in summer, Isly didn’t; and this kind o’ place she loved to lay in. Look! here’s tufts o’ wool in it, too. Mebbe a lamb came and couched down with her for company; they allers loved Isly, and come meechin’ round her whenever she’d go abroad; and mebbe she felt lonesome, and let one of ’em snuggle up to her.” His voice broke, and he hurried on; the other two felt their own eyes dimmed, as the picture came before them,—the lonely girl lying down to sleep under God’s kind sky, with the wild lamb in her arms. Still on, in silence now. They had made a circuit, and were coming near the sea again, but through rougher, wilder ways. Deep gorges dropped away before them, black as night, with huge boulders wedged across them; in the wider ones a tiny strip of green, with fresh water trickling down. Here they came to a broad meadow, with black spruces, and rocks of orange-tawny lichen glowing like flame. Again, they found themselves in a moss or bog, with rounded tufts, soft and springy, and purple flags nodding here and there; while higher up (for June had come again) they saw the scarlet sorrel spread like a gay mantle on the great hill shoulder. At the foot of one of these huge shoulders Joe Brazybone paused, and dropped his head, questing silently; then, with a gesture of caution, he led the way upward. “Do not call!” they had said in the village. “If you call, or startle her, she will go crazed, if she is not already.” Joe knew that well, and from time to time he turned fiercely on his companions, almost threatening in his earnest gestures. He would gladly have bidden them stay below, and let him go alone to find his mistress; but he knew, poor Joe, in his humble, dog-like understanding, he knew his voice was not the one that Isla would be most likely to listen to, that his face was not the one to please her best, coming suddenly into her solitude. “Gentle folks wants their like,” he said, patiently to himself. “Old Joe ain’t the proper person to speak first to his young lady, supposin’ she’s willin’ to be spoke to.”