Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/237

sob of loneliness she hid her face in her hands, and leaned over the rushing water, feeling terribly alone and forsaken.

When she looked up, darkness had set over the landscape. The Southern Cross streamed over her head, and a shallow crescent moon sailed above the great mountain-shoulder. Only the river seemed alive in that solitude, as it fled past and far through its green-roofed wilderness. It might have been a river of tears flowing from its secret birthplace in the everlasting hills, and hurrying onwards through the darkness to the unknown ocean, ever murmuring as it ran the same far-heard inconsolable lament over “something that is gone,” that it has repeated since the beginning of the world.