of
my presence."

"Weary of your presence!" repeated he. "Louise, you don't believe your
own words. May I stay here at your side till I wish to go away?"

"Certainly," answered she.

"Then let me put my arm around you," said he, encircling her waist, "and
lay your dear head here, and you are mine henceforth, for I shall never
leave you."

For a moment her tearful face was hidden on his bosom.

A low wailing wind swept through the shrubbery that surrounded them, and
one single word, thrilling and awful, as if it fell from the lips of an
accusing spirit, smote on their ears--'_Beware_!'

Louise started from the arm that encircled her and fled toward the
lighted mansion. The party were still occupied in the merry dance, and
no one seemed to have marked her brief absence.

CHAPTER XXXII.

------"Ye mountains,
So varied and so terrible in beauty;
Here in your rugged majesty of rocks
And toppling trees that twine their roots with stone
In perpendicular places, where the foot
Of man would tremble could he reach them--yes,
Ye look eternal!"

Cloud-capped, sky-crowned, mist-mantled, storm-defying Mount Washington!
O, there have been days, and weeks, and months and years, when life's
legion woes pressed heavily upon our souls and bowed our spirits in the
dust; when we dared not glance toward the past, or contemplate the
present, and turned with shuddering dread from the future of starless,
impenetrable gloom; and in those doleful years, through long, long
nights of sleepless pain and agony we have prayed, entreated, implored
grim death to come and ease us of the thorny pangs that tore our
bleeding hearts like venomed arrows. But now on reverent knee we thank
the God of nature, that he has let us live to stand upon thy
sky-piercing summit and look down on the world below! Wild Switzerland
of America! thrice proud are we to call thy granite mountains ours, for
beneath thy snow-capped summits our young existence dawned, and thy
shrill winds and stormy blasts rolled forth the sleeping anthems that
lulled our infant slumbers.

To this wild mountain region came Florence Howard, after luxuriating on
the picturesque Hudson, and dreaming herself in elysian realms among the
"thousand isles" of the queenly St. Lawrence. She was all life and
animation. The excitement of travel and vivid enjoyment of the beautiful
and sublime had