The judge apparently had not heard what his nephew said.  He always began to feel impatient as soon as the young man commenced to speak.  And he now gave his tousled head the old, unconscious toss, like a horse shaking his mane at the lighting of a persistent fly.  And then, paying no more attention to William Pressley and drawing his chair nearer Father Orin’s, he went on with the grave talk.  It was he, however, who did all the talking now; the priest had suddenly become a passive listener.  He had no more ideas to advance.

The three men turned many anxious looks on the open door.  It was still a framed space of misty gray, filled only with the melancholy mystery of the wintry dawn.  It seemed to the watchers to stay unchanged for a long time, as it always does to those who watch for its brightening in trouble and anxiety.  Yet while they longed for the light they dreaded to see it, as the troubled and alarmed always dread, lest it should reveal something terrible which the darkness has concealed.  Their words grew fewer, also, under this strain of waiting, and they gradually fell into the tone that night watchers use, when they speak of mysterious things under the gloomy spell of this sad half-light which is neither night nor day.  In the silences between their hesitating words, they bent forward and listened.  All was still—­there was no distant sound of the attorney-general’s return or of the old doctor’s coming.  In the tense stillness they could hear only the sad murmur of the river gliding under the darkness and—­now and then—­the sudden hurrying of footsteps in the chamber overhead where the wounded man lay.

And so a long, heavy hour dragged by.  The leaden gray framed by the doorway began to glimmer with a silvery pallor.  The quicker breath of the awakening world sent a heavier shower of leaves from the trees.  The birds still lingering among the cold, bare branches were already awake, and calling cheerily to one another, as if the higher world in which they lived was all untouched by the struggle and strife of this lower human world.  The heavy-hearted men in the great room of Cedar House listened with the vague wistfulness that the happiness of bird voices always brings to the troubled.  They also heard the low trumpeting of the swans as the breath of the morning swayed the rushes and that, too, filled them with a deeper longing for peace.  But suddenly the far-off echo of a horse’s rapid approach made them forget everything else.  The doctor was coming at last!  As one man, the three men sprang to open the door, and leapt out into the pallid daylight.  The horseman was now near by and in another moment they saw that the rider was not the doctor, nor yet the attorney-general, but Philip Alston.

The priest shrank back with an uncontrollable recoil and then stood still and silent, watching every movement of the tall figure which had reined up and was dismounting with the ease of a boy.  The judge and his nephew had made an exclamation at the sight of him; but they were merely surprised at the unusual hour of his appearance and he explained this at once.