his fall. The
negro looked at him once or twice with a puzzled face, but made no comment
and received no enlightenment. Indeed, so difficult was their way that
they were left but scant leisure for speech. Moment by moment the darkness
deepened, and once Haward's horse came to its knees, crashing down among
the rocks and awakening every echo.

The way, if hard, was short. The hills fell farther apart, the banks
became low and broad, and fair in front, between two slender pines, shone
out the great round moon. Leaving the bed of the stream, the two men
entered a pine wood, dim and fragrant and easy to thread. The moon rose
higher, and the light fell in wide shafts between trees that stood well
apart, with no vines to grapple one to another or undergrowth to press
about their knees.

There needed no watchfulness: the ground was smooth, the light was fair;
no motion save the pale flicker of the fireflies, no sound save the sigh
of the night wind in the boughs that were so high overhead. Master and
man, riding slowly and steadily onward through a wood that seemed
interminably the same, came at last to think of other things than the road
which they were traveling. Their hands lost grasp upon the reins, and
their eyes, ceasing to glance now here, now there, gazed steadfastly down
the gray and dreamlike vista before them, and saw no longer hole and
branch, moonlight and the white scars that the axe had made for guidance.
The vision of the slave was of supper at the quarters, of the scraping of
the fiddle in the red firelight, of the dancing and the singing. The white
man saw, at first, only a girl's face, shy and innocent,--the face of the
woodland maid who had fired his fancy, who was drawing him through the
wilderness back to the cabin in the valley. But after a while, in the gray
stillness, he lost the face, and suddenly thought, instead, of the stone
that was to cover his father's grave. The ship that was to bring the
great, dark, carven slab should be in by now; the day after his return to
Williamsburgh the stone must be put in place, covering in the green sod
and that which lay below. _Here, lieth in the hope of a joyful
resurrection_--

His mind left the grave in the churchyard at Williamsburgh, and visited
the great plantation of which he was now sole master. There was the house,
foursquare, high-roofed, many-windowed, built of dark red brick that
glowed behind the veil of the walnuts and the oaks. There, too, were t