walked out on the bridge my legs were
strangely unsteady; a weight seemed pressing on my breast so that my
breath came hard. We looked down into the shallow, placid water: the
calm of the evening was upon it; the middle of the stream was like a
rumpled glassy ribbon, but the edges, deep-shaded by overhanging trees,
were of a mysterious darkness. In all my life I think I never
experienced such a degree of silence--of breathless, oppressive silence.
It seemed as if, at any instant, it must burst into some fearful excess
of sound.

Suddenly we heard a voice--in half-articulate exclamation. I turned,
every nerve strained to the uttermost. A figure, seemingly materialized
out of darkness and silence, was moving on the bridge.

"Oh!--McAlway," a voice said.

Then I heard the Scotch Preacher in low tones.

"Have you seen Anna Williams?"

"She is at the house," answered the voice.

"Get your horse," said the Scotch Preacher.

I ran back and led the mare across the bridge (how I remember, in that
silence, the thunder of her hoofs on the loose boards!) Just at the top
of the little hill leading up from the bridge the two men turned in at a
gate. I followed quickly and the three of us entered the house together.
I remember the musty, warm, shut-in odour of the front room. I heard the
faint cry of a child. The room was dim, with a single kerosene lamp, but
I saw three women huddled by the stove, in which a new fire was blazing.
Two looked up as we entered, with feminine instinct moving aside to hide
the form of the third.

"She's all right, as soon as she gets dry," one of them said.

The other woman turned to us half complainingly:

"She ain't said a single word since we got her in here, and she won't
let go of the baby for a minute."

"She don't cry," said the other, "but just sits there like a statue."

McAlway stepped forward and said:

"Well--Anna?"

The girl looked up for the first time. The light shone full in her face:
a look I shall never forget. Yes, it was the girl I had seen so often,
and yet not the girl. It was the same childish face, but all marked upon
with inexplicable wan lines of a certain mysterious womanhood. It was
childish, but bearing upon it an inexpressible look of half-sad dignity,
that stirred a man's heart to its profoundest depths. And there was in
it, too, as I have thought since, a something I have seen in the faces
of old, wise men: a light (how shall I explain it?) as of experience