“Mother!  Mother Scythia!  Wake up!  You are dreaming!” said Rule, laying his hand on the woman’s shoulder and gently shaking her.

“Oh, what is this?  Rule!  What is it?”

“You have been dreaming, Mother Scythia.”

“Have I?” said the woman, putting her hands to her forehead and stroking away the raven locks that over-shadowed it.

And gradually she recovered from her trance and returned to her normal condition.  When Rule was quite sure that she was all right again, he said: 

“Mother Scythia, I am going to Rockhold to see the friends there who have been kind to me.  But I will come back to spend the night with you.”

“Well, lad, go.  Why should I try to hinder you?  You must work out your destiny and bear your doom,” she said, wearily, with her forehead bowed upon her hands, as if she felt the heavy prophetic cloud still over-shadowing and oppressing her.

“Mother Scythia, why do you speak so solemnly of me, and I only in my nineteenth year?” gravely inquired the youth, who, though he had been accustomed to the weird woman’s strange moods and stranger words and deemed them little less than the betrayals of insanity, yet now felt unaccountably troubled by them.

“Yes; you are young, but the years fly fast; and I—­I see the future in the present.  But go, my boy! enjoy the good of the present—­your best days, lad!—­and come back this evening and you shall find your pallet of sweet boughs and soft blankets ready for you,” she said.

Rule stooped and kissed her corrugated forehead and then left the hut.

The sun was setting behind the mountain, which threw a dark shadow over Scythia’s Ledge and Rule’s path, as he ran springing from rock to rock down the precipice to the river’s side.  It was dark when he reached the spot.  But the lights from the windows of Rockhold on the opposite shore gleamed out upon the snow with splendid effect.

Every window in the front of the building was shining with light that streamed out upon the snow; for the shutters had been left unclosed on purpose, this Christmas night.

Rule crossed the ferry and went, as he had been used to go, to the back door, opening on the back porch, where, four years before, Cora used to keep school for her one pupil.  He rapped at the door, and Sylvan sprang up and opened it.  He was warmly welcomed, and spent a pleasant evening.  The rest of his vacation was spent in a way equally pleasant, and at seven a.m., Monday, Rule was at work, type-setting in the Watch office.

On the third of January following that Christmas there were three departures from Rockhold.  Miss Rose Flowers went East to enter upon her new engagement.  Corona Haught, in charge of her grandmother and her Uncle Clarence, went West to enter the Young Ladies’ Institute, in the capital, and Master Sylvanus Haught went North, in the care of his Uncle Fabian, to enter a boy’s school.