The speaker lost a word, hesitated, became confused.  Finally silence; then the Audrey of a while before, standing with heaving bosom, shy as a fawn, fearful that she had not pleased him, after all.  For if she had done so, surely he would have told her as much.  As it was, he had said but one word, and that beneath his breath, “Eloisa!”

It would seem that her fear was unfounded; for when he did speak, there were, God wot, sugar-plums enough.  And Audrey, who in her workaday world was always blamed, could not know that the praise that was so sweet was less wholesome than the blame.

Leaving the library they went into the hall, and from the hall looked into great, echoing, half-furnished rooms.  All about lay packing-cases, many of them open, with rich stuffs streaming from them.  Ornaments were huddled on tables, mirrors and pictures leaned their faces to the walls; everywhere was disorder.

“The negroes are careless, and to-day I held their hands,” said Haward.  “I must get some proper person to see to this gear.”

Up stairs and down they went through the house, that seemed very large and very still, and finally they came out of the great front door, and down the stone steps on to the terrace.  Below them, sparkling in the sunshine, lay the river, the opposite shore all in a haze of light.  “I must go home,” Audrey shyly reminded him, whereat he smiled assent, and they went, not through the box alley to the gate in the wall, but down the terrace, and out upon the hot brown boards of the landing.  Haward, stepping into a boat, handed her to a seat in the stern, and himself took the oars.  Leaving the landing, they came to the creek and entered it.  Presently they were gliding beneath the red brick wall with the honeysuckle atop.  On the opposite grassy shore, seated in a blaze of noon sunshine, was Hugon.

They in the boat took no notice.  Haward, rowing, spoke evenly on, his theme himself and the gay and lonely life he had led these eleven years; and Audrey, though at first sight of the waiting figure she had paled and trembled, was too safe, too happy, to give to trouble any part of this magic morning.  She kept her eyes on Haward’s face, and almost forgot the man who had risen from the grass and in silence was following them.

Now, had the trader, in his hunting shirt and leggings, his moccasins and fur cap, been walking in the great woods, this silence, even with others in company, would have been natural enough to his Indian blood; but Monsieur Jean Hugon, in peruke and laced coat, walking in a civilized country, with words a-plenty and as hot as fire-water in his heart, and none upon his tongue, was a figure strange and sinister.  He watched the two in the boat with an impassive face, and he walked like an Indian on an enemy’s trail, so silently that he scarce seemed to breathe, so lightly that his heavy boots failed to crush the flowers or the tender grass.