ty. The seclusion of bed would be the
only place for Sol till such time as the elder-bush should bear the
fruit of dry clothes.

"Poor Sol!" she exclaimed, her prophetic sympathy bridging the chasm
between possibility and accomplished fact. "I'll fetch the jug myself.
I'll take the short cut an' head him."

Thus she set her feet in the path of her future. It led her into dense,
tangled woods, clambering over outcropping ledges and boulders. By the
flare of the west she guided her progress straight to the east till she
reached the banks of Headlong Creek on its tumultuous course down the
mountain-side. In her hasty enterprise she had not counted on crossing
it, but Meddlesome rarely turned back. She was strong and active, and
after a moment's hesitation, she was springing from one to another of
the great, half-submerged boulders amidst the whirl of the transparent
crystal-brown water, with its fleck and fringe of white foam. More than
once, to evade the dizzying effect of the sinuous motion and the
continuous roar, she stood still in mid-stream and gazed upward or at
the opposite bank. The woods were dense on the slope. All in red and
yellow and variant russet and brown tints, the canopy of the forest
foliage was impenetrable. The great, dark boles of oak and gum and
spruce contrasted sharply with the white and greenish-gray trunks of
beeches and sycamore and poplar, and, thus breaking the monotony, gave
long, almost illimitable avenues of sylvan vistas. She noted amidst a
growth of willows on the opposite bank, at the water's-edge, a spring, a
circular, rock-bound reservoir; in the marshy margin she could see the
imprints of the cleft hoofs of deer, and thence ran the indefinite trail
known as a deer-path. The dense covert along the steep slope was a
famous "deer-stand," and there many a fine buck had been killed. All at
once she was reminded of the storied tree hard by, the tragedy of which
she had often bewept.

There it stood, dead itself, weird, phantasmal, as befitted the housing
of so drear a fate. Its branches now bore no leaves. The lightnings of a
last-year's storm had scorched out its vital force and riven the fibre
of the wood. Here and there, too, the tooth of decay had gnawed fissures
that the bark had not earlier known; and from one of these--she thought
herself in a dream--a ghastly, white face looked out suddenly, and as
suddenly vanished!

Her heart gave one wild plunge, then it seemed to cease to b