Truly her grandfather was right. Money was a curse.
But so were other things. The religion, for instance, which told poor Gwen that her child was accursed, that its death was a punishment. Poor Gwen seated in her threadbare black, with her apron over her head, so unlike the girl in a blue cotton dress who used to tumble about on the thyme banks with her boisterous, rosy-cheeked baby.
It was pitiful. That cry _Beth n'ai! Beth n'ai! Gwae fi! beth n'ai!_ rang in Aura's ears as she sat down at last among the rocks of a sheep-shelter on the crest of a hill. Here in winter the south-west winds howled and swept the bare braes, wasting their force against the lichen-set boulders behind which even the shearling lambs could lie snugly, but in this early autumn the sun baked into the close-cropped turf, and mushrooms grew in clusters where the lambs had lain.
It was a favourite outlook of Aura's, for it gave over the widening estuary and the sea beyond. Beyond that again the setting sun; for it was growing late, and the autumn days began to close in.
She sat there on the wild thyme thinking, making up--as the young do almost unconsciously--her mind about many things, reaching forward to the future vaguely with certain new thoughts regarding it in her mind, and all the while watching the great pageant of the Death of Day enact itself out in the West.
It was a lurid sunset; full of flames, of deep, purple-stained clouds. It was a pageant of passion, self-existent, self-destroying.
Yet it was beautiful! She would sit and watch it to the end, she would see the anger and the threat of it pass into grey calm when the sun had gone.
So she sat on, the lilies still in her lap, until she was roused by a step, by one word--
She turned startled, to see the startled face of a young man behind her. It was a beautiful face, the sort of a face which women love, and in its quick amaze there was almost a hint of appeal, of hope for fair hearing.
The girl grasped the situation in a moment. He had been misled by her blue dress. He had thought she was Gwen; poor frail Gwen who was not "all wise," yet still had been wise enough to keep this secret of hers.
He turned with a half-muttered apology, in another instant he would have been gone, but Aura's strong, firm fingers were on his wrist; she looked at him from head to foot, judging him.