ir peril.

On fled the deer, on swept the horses; faster in the gleam of the
moonlight the antlered troop darted on through the gloaming; faster tore
the grays in the ecstasy of their freedom; headlong and heedless they
dashed through the thickness of leaves and the weaving of branches; neck
to neck, straining to distance each other, and held together by the gall
of the harness. The broken boughs snapped, the earth flew up beneath
their hoofs; their feet struck scarlet sparks of fire from the stones,
the carriage was whirled, rocking and tottering, through the maze
of tree-trunks, towering like pillars of black stone up against the
steel-blue clearness of the sky. The strain was intense; the danger
deadly. Suddenly, straight ahead, beyond the darkness of the foliage,
gleamed a line of light; shimmering, liquid, and glassy--here brown as
gloom where the shadows fell on it, here light as life where the stars
mirrored on it. That trembling line stretched right in their path. For
the first time, from the blanched lips beside him a cry of terror rang.

"The river!--oh, heaven!--the river!"

There it lay in the distance, the deep and yellow water, cold in the
moon's rays, with its further bank but a dull gray line in the mists
that rose from it, and its swamp a yawning grave as the horses, blind
in their delirium and racing against each other, bore down through all
obstacles toward its brink. Death was rarely ever closer; one score
yards more, one plunge, one crash down the declivity and against the
rails, one swell of the noisome tide above their heads, and life would
be closed and passed for both of them. For one breathless moment his
eyes met hers--in that moment he loved her, in that moment their hearts
beat with a truer, fonder impulse to each other than they had ever done.
Before the presence of a threatening death life grows real, love grows
precious, to the coldest and most careless.

No aid could come; not a living soul was nigh; the solitude was as
complete as though a western prairie stretched round them; there were
only the still and shadowy night, the chilly silence, on which the beat
of the plunging hoofs shattered like thunder, and the glisten of the
flowing water growing nearer and nearer every yard. The tranquillity
around only jarred more horribly on ear and brain; the vanishing forms
of the antlered deer only gave a weirder grace to the moonlight chase
whose goal was the grave. It was like the midnight h