“And Marmaduke Haward,—­what of him?” asked Truelove softly.

“He is English,” said MacLean, after a pause.  “He can make of his face a smiling mask, can keep his voice as even and as still as the pool that is a mile away from the fierce torrent its parent.  It is a gift they have, the English.  I remember at Preston”—­He broke off with a sigh.  “There will be an end some day, I suppose.  He will win her at last to his way of thinking; and having gained her, he will be happy.  And yet to my mind there is something unfortunate, strange and fatal, in the aspect of this girl.  It hath always been so.  She is such a one as the Lady in Green.  On a Halloween night, standing in the twelfth rig, a man might hear her voice upon the wind.  I would old Murdoch of Coll, who hath the second sight, were here:  he could tell the ending of it all.”

An hour later found the Highlander well upon his way to Williamsburgh, walking through wood and field with his long stride, his heart warm within him, his mind filled with the thought of Truelove and the home that he would make for her in the rude, upriver country.  Since the two had sat beneath the oak, clouds had gathered, obscuring the sun.  It was now gray and cold in the forest, and presently snow began to fall, slowly, in large flakes, between the still trees.

MacLean looked with whimsical anxiety at several white particles upon his suit of fine cloth, claret-colored and silver-laced, and quickened his pace.  But the snow was but the lazy vanguard of a storm, and so few and harmless were the flakes that when, a, mile from Williamsburgh and at some little distance from the road, MacLean beheld a ring of figures seated upon the Gounod beneath a giant elm, he stopped to observe who and what they were that sat so still beneath the leafless tree in the winter weather.

The group, that at first glimpse had seemed some conclave of beings uncouth and lubberly and solely of the forest, resolved itself into the Indian teacher and his pupils, escaped for the afternoon from the bounds of William and Mary.  The Indian lads—­slender, bronze, and statuesque—­sat in silence, stolidly listening to the words of the white man, who, standing in the midst of the ring, with his back to the elm-tree, told to his dusky charges a Bible tale.  It was the story of Joseph and his brethren.  The clear, gentle tones of the teacher reached MacLean’s ears where he stood unobserved behind a roadside growth of bay and cedar.

A touch upon the shoulder made him turn, to find at his elbow that sometime pupil of Mr. Charles Griffin in whose company he had once trudged from Fair View store to Williamsburgh.

“I was lying in the woods over there,” said Hugon sullenly.  “I heard them coming, and I took my leave.  ‘Peste!’ said I.  ’The old, weak man who preaches quietness under men’s injuries, and the young wolf pack, all brown, with Indian names!’ They may have the woods; for me, I go back to the town where I belong.”