Audrey

Because she loved him blindly, and because he was wise in his generation, her trust in him

was steadfast as her native hills, large as her faith in God. Now it was

sweet beneath her tongue to be able to tell one that was his friend how

worthy of all friendship--nay, all reverence--he was. She spoke simply,

but with that strange power of expression which nature had given her.

Gestures with her hands, quick changes in the tone of her voice, a

countenance that gave ample utterance to the moment's thought,--as one

morning in the Fair View library she had brought into being that long dead

Eloïsa whose lines she spoke, so now her auditor of to-day thought that he

saw the things of which she told.

She had risen, and was standing in the wild light, against the background

of the forest that was breathless, as if it too listened, "And so he

brought me safely to this land," she said. "And so he left me here for ten

years, safe and happy, he thought. He has told me that all that while he

thought of me as safe and happy. That I was not so,--why, that was not his

fault! When he came back I was both. I have never seen the sunshine so

bright or the woods so fair as they have been this summer. The people

with whom I live are always kind to me now,--that is his doing. And ah! it

is because he would not let Hugon scare or harm me that that wicked Indian

waits for him now beyond the bend in the road." At the thought of Hugon

she shuddered, and her eyes began to widen. "Have we not been here a long

time?" she cried. "Are you sure? Oh, God! perhaps he has passed!"

"No, no," answered MacLean, with his hand upon her arm. "There is no sign

that he has done so. It is not late; it is that heavy cloud above our

heads that has so darkened the air. Perhaps he has not left Williamsburgh

at all: perhaps, the storm threatening, he waits until to-morrow."

From the cloud above came a blinding light and a great crash of

thunder,--the one so intense, the other so tremendous, that for a minute

the two stood as if stunned. Then, "The tree!" cried Audrey. The great

pine, blasted and afire, uprooted itself and fell from them like a reed

that the wind has snapped. The thunder crash, and the din with which the

tree met its fellows of the forest, bore them down, and finally struck the

earth from which it came, seemed an alarum to waken all nature from its

sleep. The thunder became incessant, and the wind suddenly arising the

forest stretched itself and began to speak with no uncertain voice.

MacLean took his seat again upon the log, but Audrey slipped into the

road, and stood in the whirling dust, her arm raised above her eyes,

looking for the horseman whose approach she could not hope to hear through

the clamor of the storm. The wind lifted her long hair, and the rising

dust half obscured her form, bent against the blast. On the lonesome

road, in the partial light, she had the seeming of an apparition, a

creature tossed like a ball from the surging forest. She had made herself

a world, and she had become its product. In all her ways, to the day of

her death, there was about her a touch of mirage, illusion, fantasy. The

Highlander, imaginative like all his race, and a believer in things not of

heaven nor of earth, thought of spirits of the glen and the shore.