Colin was getting drowsy in the warmth of his straw-bed; for a moment, as token of that, he thought he heard Dennis’s voice, and that roused him again. But sleep was the most reasonable manner of passing these hours of waiting, which might be long; and it was certainly better than thinking about Dennis. Thicker and thicker, like the mists outside, the dusk of sleep darkened round him.
He slept soundly and dreamlessly, and woke, after some interval of the length of which he had no idea, into the full possession of his faculties, so that he had no puzzled bewilderment as to where he was or how he had come here: this waking consciousness dovetailed precisely into that which had preceded his sleep. Probably he had slept long, for he woke alert and refreshed, warm and comfortable under the straw that he had pulled over him. But close on the heels of his waking there came the conviction that he was not alone here. He had gone to sleep alone, far away from the haunts of men in the isolation of the mist, but while he slept someone had come.
He sat up, and turning looked towards the blank doorway. It was still faintly visible, a dusky oblong in the blackness, but now it framed the figure as of a man, which stood there in the entry. Some shepherd was it, who, like himself, sought shelter?
“Hullo, who is that?” said Colin. “I have lost my way, and am sheltering here till the mist clears. Lord Yardley from Stanier.”
There was silence, then very quietly a voice spoke:
Colin felt his breath catch in his throat, and a pulse beat there. This was not the voice of a shepherd come here for the lambing or for shelter, and a fantastic notion flashed into his head. Here was he, sleeping in a remote hut in the marsh at lambing-time, even as old Colin had done, and he asked himself whether some renewal or re-enactment of the legend was at hand. The idea scarcely seemed strange, so intimately did the belief in the legend beat in his blood. It was no shepherd who spoke....
That shape in the doorway seemed to him rather larger than it had been at first: perhaps it had moved a silent step nearer him. It had outlined itself a little more clearly now: the shape of the shoulders and the head was more sharply defined; round the head there was a faint luminousness like the halo the moonlight casts round a man’s shadow on the grass.