Audrey

The creek widened and widened, then doubled a grassy cape all in the

shadow of a towering sycamore. Beyond the point, crowning the low green

slope of the bank, and topped with a shaggy fell of honeysuckle and ivy,

began a red brick wall. Half way down its length it broke, and six shallow

steps led up to an iron gate, through whose bars one looked into a garden.

Gazing on down the creek past the farther stretch of the wall, the eye

came upon the shining reaches of the river.

Audrey turned the boat's head toward the steps and the gate in the wall.

The man on the opposite shore let fall an oath.

"So you go to Fair View house!" he called across the stream. "There are

only negroes there, unless"--he came to a pause, and his face changed

again, and out of his eyes looked the spirit of some hot, ancestral French

lover, cynical, suspicious, and jealously watchful--"unless their master

is at home," he ended, and laughed.

Audrey touched the wall, and over a great iron hook projecting therefrom

threw a looped rope, and fastened her boat.

"I stay here until you come forth!" swore Hugon from across the creek.

"And then I follow you back to where you must moor the boat. And then I

shall walk with you to the minister's house. Until we meet again,

ma'm'selle!"

Audrey answered not, but sped up the steps to the gate. A sick fear lest

it should be locked possessed her; but it opened at her touch, disclosing

a long, sunny path, paved with brick, and shut between lines of tall,

thick, and smoothly clipped box. The gate clanged to behind her; ten

steps, and the boat, the creek, and the farther shore were hidden from her

sight. With this comparative bliss came a faintness and a trembling that

presently made her slip down upon the warm and sunny floor, and lie there,

with her face within her arm and the tears upon her cheeks. The odor of

the box wrapped her like a mantle; a lizard glided past her; somewhere in

open spaces birds were singing; finally a greyhound came down the path,

and put its nose into the hollow of her hand.

She rose to her knees, and curled her arm around the dog's neck; then,

with a long sigh, stood up, and asked of herself if this were the way to

the house. She had never seen the house at close range, had never been in

this walled garden. It was from Williamsburgh that the minister had taken

her to his home, eleven years before. Sometimes from the river, in those

years, she had seen, rising above the trees, the steep roof and the upper

windows; sometimes upon the creek she had gone past the garden wall, and

had smelled the flowers upon the other side.