Not for a moment did he doubt the truth of her words. Before his inward eye there flashed the picture he had seen in the pattern on the ceiling, just before losing consciousness--Ranulph weeping among the fields of gillyflowers. A horror of impotent tenderness swept over him. While, with the surface of his mind, he supposed that this was IT springing out at him at last. And parallel with the agony, and in no way mitigating it, was a sense of relief--the relaxing of tension, when one can say, "Well, it has come at last." He turned a dull eye on the widow, and said, a little thickly, "The land from which no one returns ... but I can go there, too." "Follow him across the hills?" she cried scornfully. "No; you are not made of that sort of stuff." He beckoned to Peter Pease, and they went out together to the front of the house. The cocks were crowing, and there was a feeling of dawn in the air. "I want my horse," he said dully. "And can you find Miss Hazel for me?" But as he spoke she joined them--pale and wild-eyed. "From my room I heard you coming out," she said. "Is it--is it over?" Master Nathaniel nodded. And then, in a quiet voice emptied of all emotion, he told her what he had just learned from the widow. She went still paler than before, and her eyes filled with tears. Then, turning to Peter Pease, he said, "You will immediately get out a warrant for the apprehension of Endymion Leer and send it into Lud to the new Mayor, Master Polydore Vigil. And you, Miss Hazel, you'd better leave this place at once--you will have to be plaintiff in the trial. Go to your aunt, Mistress Ivy Peppercorn, who keeps the village shop at Mothgreen. And remember, you must say nothing whatever about the part I've played in this business--that is essential. I am not popular at present in Lud. And, now, would you kindly order my horse saddled and brought round." There was something so colourless, so dead, in his voice, that both Hazel and the smith stood, for a few seconds, in awed and sympathetic silence, and then Hazel went off slowly to order his horse. "You ... you didn't mean what you said to the widow, sir, about ... about going ... yonder?" asked Peter Pease in an awed voice. Suddenly the fire was rekindled in Master Nathaniel's eyes, and he cried fiercely, "Aye, yonder, and beyond yonder, if need be ... till I find my son." It did not take long for his horse to be saddled and led to the door. "Good-bye, my child," he said to Hazel, taking her hand, and then he added, with a smile, "You dragged me back last night from the Milky Way ... and now I am going by the earthly one." She and Peter stood watching him, riding along the valley towards the Debatable Hills, till he and his horse were just a speck in the distance. "Well, well," said Peter Pease, "I warrant it'll be the first time in the history of Dorimare that a man has loved his son well enough to follow him yonder." CHAPTER XXV