trees; how soft the black that thickened about them till
they were effaced. Gabriella thought of them as still perfectly white
out there in the darkness. Three evenings with her face against the
pane she had watched for a familiar figure to stalk towering up the
yard path, and no familiar figure had come. Three evenings she had
returned to her firelight, and sat before it with an ear on guard for
the sound of a familiar step on the porch below; but no step had been
heard.

On the first night she had all but hoped that he would not seek her;
the avowal of their love for each other had well-nigh left it an
unendurable joy. But the second night she had begun to expect him
confidently; and when the hour had passed and he had not come,
Gabriella sat long before her fire with a new wound--she who had felt
so many. By the third day she had reviewed all that she had ever heard
of him or known of him: gathered it all afresh as a beautiful thing for
receiving him with when he should come to her that night. Going early
to her room she had taken her chair to the window and with her face
close to the pane had watched again--watched that white yard; and again
nothing moved in that white yard but the darkness.

She sprang up and began to walk to and fro.

"If he does not come to-night, something has happened. I know, I know,
I know! Something is wrong. My heart is not mistaken. Oh, if anything
were to happen to HIM! I must not think of it! I have borne many
things; but THAT! I must not think of it!"

She sank into her chair with her ear strained toward the porch below.
For a long time there was no sound. Then she heard the noise of heavy
boots--a tapping of the toes against the pillars, to knock off the
snow, and then the slow creaking of soles across the frozen boards. She
started up. "It is some one else," she cried, wringing her hands.
"Something has happened to him."

She stopped still in the middle of the room, her arms dropped at her
sides, her eyes stretched wide.

The house girl's steps were heard running upstairs. Gabriella jerked
the door open in her face.

"What is the matter?" she cried.

A negro man had come with a message for her. The girl looked frightened.

Gabriella ran past her down into the hall. "What is the matter?" she
asked.

His Marse David had sent for her and wanted her to come at once. He had
brought a horse for her.

"Is he ill--seriously ill?" He had had a bad cold and was worse.

"The doct