them.  The best woman is not above being touched by the effect of her power over the worst man, and Kate at first allowed herself to think of Falkner in that light.  But if in her later reflections he suffered as a heroic experience to be forgotten, he gained something as an actual man to be remembered.  Now that the proposed rides from “his friend’s house” were a part of the illusion, would he ever dare to visit them again?  Would she dare to see him?  She held her breath with a sudden pain of parting that was new to her; she tried to think of something else, to pick up the scattered threads of her life before that eventful day.  But in vain; that one week had filled the place with implacable memories, or more terrible, as it seemed to her and her sister, they had both lost their feeble, alien hold upon Eagle’s Court in the sudden presence of the real genii of these solitudes, and henceforth they alone would be the strangers there.  They scarcely dared to confess it to each other, but this return to the dazzling sunlight and cloudless skies of the past appeared to them to be the one unreal experience; they had never known the true wild flavor of their home, except in that week of delicious isolation.  Without breathing it aloud, they longed for some vague denoument to this experience that should take them from Eagle’s Court forever.

It was noon the next day when the little household beheld the last shred of their illusion vanish like the melting snow in the strong sunlight of John Hale’s return.  He was accompanied by Colonel Clinch and Rawlins, two strangers to the women.  Was it fancy, or the avenging spirit of their absent companions? but he too looked a stranger, and as the little cavalcade wound its way up the slope he appeared to sit his horse and wear his hat with a certain slouch and absence of his usual restraint that strangely shocked them.  Even the old half-condescending, half-punctilious gallantry of his greeting of his wife and family was changed, as he introduced his companions with a mingling of familiarity and shyness that was new to him.  Did Mrs. Hale regret it, or feel a sense of relief in the absence of his usual seignorial formality?  She only knew that she was grateful for the presence of the strangers, which for the moment postponed a matrimonial confidence from which she shrank.

“Proud to know you,” said Colonel Clinch, with a sudden outbreak of the antique gallantry of some remote Huguenot ancestor.  “My friend, Judge Hale, must be a regular Roman citizen to leave such a family and such a house at the call of public duty.  Eh, Rawlins?”

“You bet,” said Rawlins, looking from Kate to her sister in undisguised admiration.

“And I suppose the duty could not have been a very pleasant one,” said Mrs. Hale, timidly, without looking at her husband.