“We will let thought alone,” continued Haward.  “It suits not with this charmed light, this glamour of the summer.”  He made a laughing gesture.  “Hey, presto! little maid, there go the years rolling back!  I swear I see the mountains through the willow leaves.”

“There was one like a wall shutting out the sun when he went down,” answered Audrey.  “It was black and grim, and the light flared like a fire behind it.  And there was the one above which the moon rose.  It was sharp, pointing like a finger to heaven, and I liked it best.  Do you remember how large was the moon pushing up behind the pine-trees?  We sat on the dark hillside watching it, and you told me beautiful stories, while the moon rose higher and higher and the mockingbirds began to sing.”

Haward remembered not, but he said that he did so.  “The moon is full again,” he continued, “and last night I heard a mockingbird in the garden.  I will come in the barge to-morrow evening, and the negroes shall row us up and down the river—­you and me and Mistress Deborah—­between the sunset and the moonrise.  Then it is lonely and sweet upon the water.  The roses can be smelled from the banks, and if you will speak to the mockingbirds we shall have music, dryad Audrey, brown maid of the woods!”

Audrey’s laugh, was silver-clear and sweet, like that of a forest nymph indeed.  She was quite happy again, with all her half-formed doubts and fears allayed.  They had never been of him,—­only of herself.  The two sat within the green and swaying fountain of the willow, and time went by on eagle wings.  Too soon came the slave to call them to the house; the time within, though spent in the company of Darden and his wife, passed too soon; too soon came the long shadows of the afternoon and Haward’s call for his horse.

Audrey watched him ride away, and the love light was in her eyes.  She did not know that it was so.  That night, in her bare little room, when the candle was out, she kneeled by the window and looked at the stars.  There was one very fair and golden, an empress of the night.  “That is the princess,” said Audrey, and smiled upon the peerless star.  Far from that light, scarce free from the murk of the horizon, shone a little star, companionless in the night.  “And that is I,” said Audrey, and smiled upon herself.

CHAPTER XIV

THE BEND IN THE ROAD

    “’Brave Derwentwater he is dead;
      From his fair body they took the head: 
      But Mackintosh and his friends are fled,
      And they’ll set the hat upon another head’”—­

chanted the Fair View storekeeper, and looked aside at Mistress Truelove Taberer, spinning in the doorway of her father’s house.

Truelove answered naught, but her hands went to and fro, and her eyes were for her work, not for MacLean, sitting on the doorstep at her feet.

    “‘And whether they’re gone beyond the sea’”—­