bove her. A man driving two cows toward
town, stared at her; then a wagon drawn by four horses rattled along,
bearing homeward a gay picnic party of young people, who made the woods
ring with the echoes of "Hold the Fort." The grandeur of towering
pines, the mysterious dimness of illimitable arcades, and the peculiar
resinous odor that stole like lingering ghosts of myrrh, frankincense
and onycha through the vaulted solitude of a deserted hoary sanctuary,
all these phases of primeval Southern forests combined to weave a spell
that the stranger could not resist.

After a while, fearful of straying too far, the weary woman threw her
shawl on the brown straw, and sat down quite near the road. She leaned
her bare head against the trunk of a pine, listened to the katydids
gossiping in a distant oak that shaded the "branch," to the quavering
strident song of a locust; and she intended, after resting for a few
moments, to return to the station-house; but unexpected drowsiness
overpowered her. Suddenly aroused from a sound sleep, she heard the
clatter of galloping hoofs, and as she sprang up, the horse, startled
by her movement, shied and reared within a few feet of the spot where
she stood. The moon shone full on the glossy black animal, and upon his
powerful rider, and Beryl recognized the massive head, swarthy face and
keen eyes of the attorney, Lennox Dunbar. He leaned forward and said,
as he patted the erect ears of his horse:

"Madam, you seem a stranger. Have you lost your way?"

"No, sir."

"Pardon me; but having seen you this afternoon at 'Elm Bluff,' I
thought it possible you had missed the road."

Standing so straight and tall, with the sheen of the moon on her
faultless features, he thought she looked the incarnation of some
prescient Norn, fit for the well of Urda.

She made no reply; and he touched his hat, and rode rapidly away in the
direction of the town, carrying an indelible impression of the
mysterious picture under the pines.

The sky had changed; the face of the moon had cleared, but tatters and
scuds of smoke-colored cloud fled northward, as if scourged by a stormy
current too high to stir the sultry stagnation of the lower atmospheric
stratum. From its vaporous lair somewhere in the cypress and palm
jungles of the Mexican Gulf borders, the tempest had risen, and before
its breath the shreds of cloud flew like avant couriers of disaster.
Already the lurid glare of incessant sheet lightning fought