There was danger now. The rush of the current, tortured by hidden rocks, sent the little craft onward, as if it had been a dead leaf cast into the eddy. Mabel liked the danger and the tumult. The rising wind blew in her face. The waters sparkled and dashed around her. The frail oars bent and quivered in her hands. It was something to brave and fight against; but for this scope of action the new anguish that had swept through the soul of that woman must have smothered her.
On the little boat went, dancing and leaping down the current, recoiling with a quiver from the hidden rocks which it touched more than once, but springing vigorously back to its flight, like a bird upon the wing.
"Oh, if this be so, let me die now. Why will it not strike? How came they to make the boat so light and yet so strong? It is true! It is true! I feel it in every throb of my pulse. After this, the life that I thought so dreary, will be a lost paradise, to which, plead as I may, there is no going back. I will know, God help me, but I must know if this is a wild suspicion, or a miserable, miserable reality!"
These words bespoke the concentration of some resolves. She grasped her oars more firmly, and with a sharp glance around, put her boat upon its course. It shot through hidden rocks; it cut across the eddies recklessly as before, but all the time a single course was pursued. At last the little craft entered the mouth of a mountain stream that came sparkling down a pretty hemlock hollow in the hills. The hollow was dusky with coming night, but the tree-tops were still brightened by a red tinge from the sunset, and there was light enough to find a footpath which wound upward along the margin of the brook.
CHAPTER VI.
THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE HILL.
Mabel left her boat and followed the path till she reached a natural terrace in the hills, narrow and green, upon which a small, one-story house was snugly bestowed. The terrace was uncultivated, save a small garden patch close to the house, where the soil was torn and uneven from the uprooting of vegetables from the rudely-shaped beds. Sweetbrier and wild honey-suckles gave a picturesque grace to the building, at variance with the untidy state of the grounds, and there was something in the whole place more suggestive of refinement than is usual to dwellings where the inmates work hard for their daily bread.
Mabel Harrington had never been in this place before. As she approached it, the cry of a whippowil came up from the hollow, as if warning her away. Everything was still within the house. There was no light; the rustle of leaves with the flow of waters from the ravine, joined their mournful whispers with the wail of the night bird.
Mabel was imaginative as a girl, and this solitude depressed her; still she moved steadily towards the house, and knocked at the door.
A woman opened it, whose person was seen but indistinctly, as she stood within the small entry, holding the door with one hand; but Mabel saw that she was dark and dressed as she had seen that class of persons in the south.