"I must go; the cows must be milked. Poor Garthowen is a sad house to-day! I wish I could comfort them a little, but 'tis all dark."
And as she crossed the moor to the Cribserth, she looked round her, but found no shred of comfort. The sea, all rough and torn by the high wind, looked cold and cruel; the brow of the hill, which Gethin's whistle had so often enlivened, looked bare and uninteresting; the moor had lost its gorgeous tints; a rock pigeon, endeavouring to reach its nest, was driven by the wind against a thorn bush.
"Tis pricked and beaten like me," thought the girl, and struggling with the high wind, she helped the bird with tender fingers to extricate himself.
When she entered the farmyard Daisy stood waiting, and Morva, knowing that without her song there would be no milk, began the old refrain, but her voice broke, and while she sang with trembling lips the tears ran down her cheeks.
The news of Gethin's absence was soon bruited abroad, and many were the conjectures as to its cause.
"He seemed so jolly at the cynos," said the farm servants; "who'd have thought his heart was away with the shipping and the foreign ports?"
"Well, well," said the farmers, "Garthowen will have to do without Gethin Owens, that's plain; the roving spirit is in him still, and Ebben Owens will have to look alive, with only Ann and Gwilym Morris to help him."
"Well, he needn't be so proud, then! Will a clergyman indeed! 'tis at home at the plough I'd keep him!"
But nobody knew anything of the robbery, which added so much poignancy to the sorrow at Garthowen. Ebben Owens seemed to take his son's disappearance much to heart, and to feel his absence more in sorrow than in anger.
Will grew more and more irritable, so that it was almost a relief when one day in the following week he took his departure for Llaniago, his father accompanying him in the car, and returning next day with glowing accounts of his son's introduction to the world of learning and collegiate life.
"If you were to see him in his cap and gown!" he said, "oh, there's a gentleman he looks; in my deed there wasn't one in the whole college so handsome as our Will! so straight and so tall, and everybody noticing him."
And so Will was launched on the voyage of clerical life with full sails and colours flying, while Gethin was allowed to sink into oblivion; his name was never mentioned, his place knew him no more, and the tide of life flowed on at Garthowen with the outward monotonous peace and regularity common to all farm life. Ebben Owens leant more on Gwilym and Ann, and Twm took his own way more, but further than this there was no difference in the daily routine of work.