The white man and the negro, each leading his horse, picked their way with caution among the pitfalls of the rocky and uneven road.  With the passing of the Governor and his train a sudden cure had been wrought, for now Haward’s step was as firm and light as it had been before his fall.  The negro looked at him once or twice with a puzzled face, but made no comment and received no enlightenment.  Indeed, so difficult was their way that they were left but scant leisure for speech.  Moment by moment the darkness deepened, and once Haward’s horse came to its knees, crashing down among the rocks and awakening every echo.

The way, if hard, was short.  The hills fell farther apart, the banks became low and broad, and fair in front, between two slender pines, shone out the great round moon.  Leaving the bed of the stream, the two men entered a pine wood, dim and fragrant and easy to thread.  The moon rose higher, and the light fell in wide shafts between trees that stood well apart, with no vines to grapple one to another or undergrowth to press about their knees.

There needed no watchfulness:  the ground was smooth, the light was fair; no motion save the pale flicker of the fireflies, no sound save the sigh of the night wind in the boughs that were so high overhead.  Master and man, riding slowly and steadily onward through a wood that seemed interminably the same, came at last to think of other things than the road which they were traveling.  Their hands lost grasp upon the reins, and their eyes, ceasing to glance now here, now there, gazed steadfastly down the gray and dreamlike vista before them, and saw no longer hole and branch, moonlight and the white scars that the axe had made for guidance.  The vision of the slave was of supper at the quarters, of the scraping of the fiddle in the red firelight, of the dancing and the singing.  The white man saw, at first, only a girl’s face, shy and innocent,—­the face of the woodland maid who had fired his fancy, who was drawing him through the wilderness back to the cabin in the valley.  But after a while, in the gray stillness, he lost the face, and suddenly thought, instead, of the stone that was to cover his father’s grave.  The ship that was to bring the great, dark, carven slab should be in by now; the day after his return to Williamsburgh the stone must be put in place, covering in the green sod and that which lay below. Here, lieth in the hope of a joyful resurrection—­

His mind left the grave in the churchyard at Williamsburgh, and visited the great plantation of which he was now sole master.  There was the house, foursquare, high-roofed, many-windowed, built of dark red brick that glowed behind the veil of the walnuts and the oaks.  There, too, were the quarters,—­the home quarter, that at the creek, that on the ridge.  Fifty white servants, three hundred slaves,—­and he was the master.  The honeysuckles in the garden that had been his father’s pride, the shining