Meanwhile, attended by her maid, Miss Merlin went on her way homeward.  She reached Tanglewood in time for dinner, at six o’clock.

At table the judge said to her: 

“Well, Claudia! the doctor has been here on his evening visit, and he says that you may see our young patient in the morning, after he has had his breakfast; but that no visitor must be admitted to his chamber at any later hour of the day.”

“Very well, papa.  I hope you will give old Katie to understand that, so she may not give me any trouble when I apply at the door,” smiled Claudia.

“Katie understands it all, my dear,” said the judge.

And so it was arranged that Claudia should visit her young preserver on the following morning.

CHAPTER XLV.

THE INTERVIEW.

  The lady of his love re-entered there;
  She was serene and smiling then, and yet
  She knew she was by him beloved—­she knew,
  For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
  Was darken’d by her shadow; and she saw
  That he was wretched; but she saw not all. 
  He took her hand, a moment o’er his face
  A tablet of unutterable thoughts
  Was traced, and then it faded as it came.

  —­Byron.

It was as yet early morning; but the day promised to be sultry, and all the windows of Ishmael’s chamber were open to facilitate the freest passage of air.  Ishmael lay motionless upon his cool, white bed, letting his glances wander abroad, whither his broken limbs could no longer carry him.

His room, being a corner one, rejoiced in four large windows, two looking east and two north.  Close up to these windows grew the clustering woods.  Amid their branches even the wildest birds built nests, and their strange songs mingled with the rustle of the golden green leaves as they glimmered in the morning sun and breeze.

It was a singular combination, that comfortable room, abounding in all the elegancies of the highest civilization, and that untrodden wilderness in which the whip-poor-will cried and the wild eagle screamed.

And Ishmael, as he looked through the dainty white-draped windows into the tremulous shadows of the wood, understood how the descendant of Powhatan, weary of endless brick walls, dusty streets, and crowded thoroughfares, should, as soon as he was free from official duties, fly to the opposite extreme of all these—­to his lodge in this unbroken forest, where scarcely a woodman’s ax had sounded, where scarcely a human foot had fallen.  He sympathized with the “monomania” of Randolph Merlin in not permitting a thicket to be thinned out, a road to be opened, or a tree to be trimmed on his wild woodland estate; so that here at least, nature should have her own way, with no hint of the world’s labor and struggle to disturb her vital repose.

As these reveries floated through the clear, active brain of the invalid youth, the door of his chamber softly opened.