“Qu’avez vous?” she exclaimed.

“The old willow is fallen in the wind,” he replied.

“Quel dommage that we did not see it fall!”

“It has killed one of the horses, I fear,” he continued, measuring, as formerly, her terror by her levity.  “Capua! is all right?  Are you safe?”

“Yah, massa!” responded a voice from the depths, as Capua floundered with the remaining horse in the thicket at the lake-edge below.  “Yah, massa,—­nuffin harm Ol’ Cap in water; spec he born to die in galluses; had nuff chance to be in glory, ef ’twasn’t.  I’s done beat wid dis yer pony, anyhow, Mass’r Raleigh.  Seems, ef he was a ’sect to fly in de face of all creation an’ pay no ‘tention to his centre o’ gravity, he might walk up dis yer hill!”

Mr. Raleigh left Marguerite a moment, to relieve Capua’s perplexity.  Through the remaining darkness, the sparkle of stars, and wild fling of shadows in the wind, she could but dimly discern the struggling figures, and the great creature trampling and snorting below.  She remembered strange tales out of the “Arabian Nights,” “Bellerophon and the Chimaera,” “St. George and the Dragon”; she waited, half-expectant, to see the great talon-stretched wings flap up against the slow edge of dawn, where Orion lay, a pallid monster, watching the planet that flashed like some great gem low in a crystalline west, and she stepped nearer, with a kind of eager and martial spirit, to do battle in turn.

“Stand aside, Una!” cried Mr. Raleigh, who had worked in a determined characteristic silence, and the horse’s head, sharp ear, and starting eye were brought to sight, and then his heaving bulk.

“All right, massa!” cried Capua, after a moment’s survey, as he patted the trembling flanks.  “Pretty tough ex’cise dat!  Spect Massam Clean be mighty high,—­his best cretur done about killed wid dat tree;—­feared he show dis nigger a stick worf two o’ dat!”

“We had like to have finished our dance on nothing,” said Mr. Raleigh now, looking back on the splintered wheels and panels.  “Will you mount?  I can secure you from falling.”

“Oh, no,—­I can walk; it is only a little way.”

“Reach home like Cinderella?  If you had but one glass slipper, that might be; but in satin ones it is impossible.”  And she found herself seated aloft before quite aware what had happened.

Pacing along, they talked lightly, with the gayety natural upon excitement,—­Capua once in a while adding a cogent word.  As they opened the door, Mr. Raleigh paused a moment.

“I am glad,” he said, “that my last day with you has been crowned by such adventures.  I leave the Lake at noon.”

She hung, listening, with a backward swerve of figure, and regarding him in the dim light of the swinging hall-lamp, for the moment half-petrified.  Suddenly she turned and seized his hand in hers,—­then threw it off.

“Cher ami,” she murmured hastily, in a piercing whisper, like some articulate sigh, “si tu m’aimes, dis moi!”