"Not by love. I know that!"
"Not at all. Look at me, cousin Abby! how strangely you are peering into the distance, as if something in the gloom drew your eyes from my face! What is it you see, cousin?"
Elizabeth bent forward, and looked keenly in the direction her cousin's eyes had taken. Far down the hollow she saw the young hunter whose presence had surprised her on the road a few hours before.
"Hush, Abby! Don't speak yet; but look and tell me who he is?"
As she spoke, Elizabeth leaned forward till her golden curls took the wind and fluttered out like sunbeams on the air. The man saw her, turned and disappeared among the undergrowth of the hollow.
"Did you ever see him before?" questioned Elizabeth of her cousin, as she shrunk back with a sort of superstitious dread, for the man had vanished like a phantom; "or have the woods become haunted since I went away?"
Abby Williams started up with nervous haste. "Come, come, you must be hungry by this time: it is almost noon; old Tituba will be waiting, and you know nothing makes her so angry as leaving her Johnny-cake to be eaten cold. She will never forgive us."
Elizabeth sighed. A pang of disappointment came across her sunny nature. Why was Abby so changed? How had it happened that a confession, which she had shrunk from and dreamed over, should have been told in that hard, common-place fashion? Why were the sweet tidings which had cost her so much agitation received so coldly by the only creature who had never till then felt a thought or feeling unshared with her?
"Well," she said, and her bright eyes filled as she spoke, while a laugh that had bitter tones in it rose to her lip, "I did not think you would have taken all this so coldly. But never mind; as you say, Tituba's Johnny-cake must not get cold."
With a slight bound she reached the shelf of rock below her, and hurried away, followed by Abigail Williams, who stopped every other moment to look anxiously around, but still kept near her cousin.