Luke yawned and stretched himself. "It must be getting near dawn," he said. They had successfully doubled the dangerous cape of midnight, and he began to feel secure of safely weathering what remained of their dark voyage. It was the hour when night-watchers begin to idealize their bed, and, with Sancho Panza, to bless the man who invented it. They shuddered, and drew their cloaks closer round their shoulders. Then, something happened. It was not so much a modification of the darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that one felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade of its density ... ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the hills she is bleeding to death. At first the spot was merely a degree less black than the rest of the sky. Then it turned grey, then yellow, then red. And the earth was undergoing the same transformation. Here and there patches of greyness broke out in the blackness of the grass, and after a few seconds one saw that they were clumps of flowers. Then the greyness became filtered with a delicate sea-green; and next, one realized that the grey-green belonged to the foliage, against which the petals were beginning to show white--and then pink, or yellow, or blue; but a yellow like that of primroses, a blue like that of certain wild periwinkles, colours so elusive that one suspects them to be due to some passing accident of light, and that, were one to pick the flower, it would prove to be pure white. Ah, there can be no doubt of it now! The blues and yellows are real and perdurable. Colour is steadily flowing through the veins of the earth, and we may take heart, for she will soon be restored to life again. But had we kept one eye on the sky we should have noticed that a star was quenched with every flower that reappeared on earth. And now the valley is again red and gold with vineyards, the hills are clothed with pines, and the Dapple is rosy. Then a cock crowed, and another answered it, and then another--a ghostly sound, which, surely, did not belong to the smiling, triumphant earth, but rather to one of those distant dying stars. But what had taken Ranulph? He had sprung to his feet and was standing motionless, a strange light in his eyes. And then again, from a still more distant star, it seemed, another cock crowed, and another answered it. "The piper! the piper!" cried Ranulph in a loud triumphant voice. And, before his astonished companions could get to their feet, he was dashing up one of the bridle-paths towards the Debatable Hills. CHAPTER XXI THE OLD GOATHERD For a few seconds they stood petrified, and then Luke was seized with panic, and, calling to the little boys to stay where they were, dashed off in pursuit. Up the path he pounded, from time to time shouting angrily to Ranulph to come back, but the distance between them grew ever wider.