ass the night. Therefore she held a long and animated
discussion with her aunt; when the good spinster reluctantly yielded
to the representation of her niece, and folding her in her arms, she
kissed the cold cheek and fervently blessing her allowed her to depart
on an errand of fraternal love.

The night had set in dark and chilling as Frances Wharton, with a
beating heart but light step, moved through the little garden that lay
behind the farm-house which had been her brother's prison, and took
her way to the foot of the mountain, where she had seen the figure of
him she supposed to be the peddler.

Without pausing to reflect, however, she flew over the ground with a
rapidity that seemed to bid defiance to all impediments, nor stopped
even to breathe, until she had gone half the distance to the rock that
she had marked as the spot where Birch made his appearance on that
very morning.

When she heard the footsteps of a horse moving slowly up the road, she
shrank timidly into a little thicket of wood which grew around the
spring that bubbled from the side of a hillock near her. Frances
listened anxiously to the retreating footsteps of the horse; and, as
they died upon her ear, she ventured from her place of secrecy and
advanced a short distance into the field, where, startled at the gloom
and appalled with the dreariness of the prospect, she paused to
reflect on what she had undertaken.

Throwing back the hood of her cardinal,[121] she sought the support
of a tree and gazed towards the summit of the mountain that was to be
the goal of her enterprise. It rose from the plain like a huge
pyramid, giving nothing to the eye but its outlines.

[Footnote 121: a woman's short cloak.]

Frances turned her looks towards the east, in earnest gaze at the
clouds which constantly threatened to involve her again in comparative
darkness. Had an adder stung her, she could not have sprung with
greater celerity than she recoiled from the object against which she
was leaning, and which she had for the first time noticed. The two
upright posts, with a cross-beam on their tops and a rude platform
beneath, told but too plainly the nature of the structure; even the
cord was suspended from an iron staple, and was swinging to and fro in
the night air. Frances hesitated no longer, but rather flew than ran
across the meadow, and was soon at the base of the rock, where she
hoped to find something like a path to the summit of the mountain.