h," said MacLean, after a pause. "He can make of his face a
smiling mask, can keep his voice as even and as still as the pool that is
a mile away from the fierce torrent its parent. It is a gift they have,
the English. I remember at Preston"--He broke off with a sigh. "There will
be an end some day, I suppose. He will win her at last to his way of
thinking; and having gained her, he will be happy. And yet to my mind
there is something unfortunate, strange and fatal, in the aspect of this
girl. It hath always been so. She is such a one as the Lady in Green. On a
Halloween night, standing in the twelfth rig, a man might hear her voice
upon the wind. I would old Murdoch of Coll, who hath the second sight,
were here: he could tell the ending of it all."

An hour later found the Highlander well upon his way to Williamsburgh,
walking through wood and field with his long stride, his heart warm within
him, his mind filled with the thought of Truelove and the home that he
would make for her in the rude, upriver country. Since the two had sat
beneath the oak, clouds had gathered, obscuring the sun. It was now gray
and cold in the forest, and presently snow began to fall, slowly, in large
flakes, between the still trees.

MacLean looked with whimsical anxiety at several white particles upon his
suit of fine cloth, claret-colored and silver-laced, and quickened his
pace. But the snow was but the lazy vanguard of a storm, and so few and
harmless were the flakes that when, a, mile from Williamsburgh and at some
little distance from the road, MacLean beheld a ring of figures seated
upon the Gounod beneath a giant elm, he stopped to observe who and what
they were that sat so still beneath the leafless tree in the winter
weather.

The group, that at first glimpse had seemed some conclave of beings
uncouth and lubberly and solely of the forest, resolved itself into the
Indian teacher and his pupils, escaped for the afternoon from the bounds
of William and Mary. The Indian lads--slender, bronze, and statuesque--sat
in silence, stolidly listening to the words of the white man, who,
standing in the midst of the ring, with his back to the elm-tree, told to
his dusky charges a Bible tale. It was the story of Joseph and his
brethren. The clear, gentle tones of the teacher reached MacLean's ears
where he stood unobserved behind a roadside growth of bay and cedar.

A touch upon the shoulder made him turn, to find at his elbow that
sometime pu