t, and tie your
hair with my gift. I will not hurt you. I will tell you the French love
songs that my father sang to my mother. I will speak of land that I have
bought (oh, I have prospered, ma'm'selle!), and of a house that I mean to
build, and of a woman that I wish to put in the house,--a Sunshine in the
Dark to greet me when I come from my hunting in the great forests beyond
the falls, from my trading with the nation of the Tuscaroras, with the
villages of the Monacans. Come over to me, Morning Light!"

The creek widened and widened, then doubled a grassy cape all in the
shadow of a towering sycamore. Beyond the point, crowning the low green
slope of the bank, and topped with a shaggy fell of honeysuckle and ivy,
began a red brick wall. Half way down its length it broke, and six shallow
steps led up to an iron gate, through whose bars one looked into a garden.
Gazing on down the creek past the farther stretch of the wall, the eye
came upon the shining reaches of the river.

Audrey turned the boat's head toward the steps and the gate in the wall.
The man on the opposite shore let fall an oath.

"So you go to Fair View house!" he called across the stream. "There are
only negroes there, unless"--he came to a pause, and his face changed
again, and out of his eyes looked the spirit of some hot, ancestral French
lover, cynical, suspicious, and jealously watchful--"unless their master
is at home," he ended, and laughed.

Audrey touched the wall, and over a great iron hook projecting therefrom
threw a looped rope, and fastened her boat.

"I stay here until you come forth!" swore Hugon from across the creek.
"And then I follow you back to where you must moor the boat. And then I
shall walk with you to the minister's house. Until we meet again,
ma'm'selle!"

Audrey answered not, but sped up the steps to the gate. A sick fear lest
it should be locked possessed her; but it opened at her touch, disclosing
a long, sunny path, paved with brick, and shut between lines of tall,
thick, and smoothly clipped box. The gate clanged to behind her; ten
steps, and the boat, the creek, and the farther shore were hidden from her
sight. With this comparative bliss came a faintness and a trembling that
presently made her slip down upon the warm and sunny floor, and lie there,
with her face within her arm and the tears upon her cheeks. The odor of
the box wrapped her like a mantle; a lizard glided past her; somewhere in
open spaces birds w