THE park at "Norston's Rest" was divided by a swift stream that flowed into it from the distant uplands, separating the highly cultivated portions from the wilderness. Jessup's cottage was within the pleasure grounds, but its upper windows overlooked a small but deep lake, formed by a ravine, and the hollows of a rocky ledge, which made an almost bottomless gulf, into which the mountain stream emptied itself, and after losing half its volume in some underground outlet glided off down the valley.
Nothing could be more wild and picturesque than this little lake, embosomed, as it was, with thrifty evergreens, fine old trees, and rocks, to which the ivy clung in luxuriant draperies. At its outlet, where the sun shone most of the day, wild hyacinths and mats of blue violets empurpled the banks before they appeared in any other place, and a host of summer flowers kept up the blossom season sometimes long after leaf-fall. Near this spot, the brightest of all the wilderness, stood an old summer-house, built by some former lord of "The Rest." Jessup had trained wild roses among the ivy that completely matted the old building together, and around its base had allowed the lush grasses to grow uncut, casting their seed, year by year, until the most thrifty reached to the balustrades of a wooden balcony that partly overhung the lake in its deepest part.
Nothing could be more picturesque than this old building, when the moon shone down upon and kindled up the waters beneath it, with a brightness more luminous than silver. The shivering ivy, the flickering shadows of a great tree, that drooped long, protecting branches over it, formed a picture that any artist would have got up at midnight to look upon. Still a more practical man might have pronounced its old timbers unsafe, and its position, half perched on a bank, with its balcony over the water, dangerous as it was picturesque.
Be this as it may, two persons stood within this building, after eleven o'clock at night, revealed by the same moon that looked down on those two wounded men, now struggling for life in the proud old mansion and the humble cottage. It was curved like the blade of a sickle then. Now, its rounded fulness flooded the whole wilderness, breaking up its darkness into massive shadows, all the blacker from contrast with the struggling illumination.
The waterfall at the head of the lake was so far off that its noise gave no interruption to the voices of these two persons when they met, for Storms had arrived earlier than the girl, and lay apparently asleep on one of the fixed seats, when Judith Hart came in, breathless with fast walking, and gave forth sharp expletives of disappointment when she supposed the summer-house empty.
"Not here. The wretch—the coward! I knew it—I knew it! He never meant to come. Does he think I will trapse all this way, and wait for him? If I do, may I—Ha!"
The girl stopped at the door, through which she was angrily repassing, with the invective cut short on her lips.
"Hallo! Is it you, Judith? I began to think you wasn't coming, and dropped asleep. But, upon my soul, I was dreaming about you all the time."
"Here you are!" said the girl, coming slowly back. "How was one to know—lying there like a log? That isn't the way one expects to be met after a walk like this!"
"Why, what's the matter? The walk is just nothing for an active girl like you, but I hope you had no trouble in getting out."