The shining pathway led her to the summit of the hill; and as she began to descend the other slope, it vanished with the sun. But she was not troubled, for she saw at a glance that the brook to whose banks she was coming was the one flowing through the farm of the Quaker. "Perhaps I shall see him again," she said to herself, and the hope made her tumultuously happy.
She had lost all consciousness of the flight of time, and now noticed with surprise that it was evening. The crows were winging their way to their nesting ground; the rabbits were seeking their burrows; the whole animal world was faring homeward. Some universal impulse seemed to be driving them along their predestined paths, as it drove the brooks and the clouds, and Pepeeta appeared, as much as they, to be borne onward by a power above herself. She was but little more conscious of choosing her path than the doe who at a little distance was hurrying home to her mate; so completely were all her volitional powers in abeyance to the emotional elements of her soul.
CHAPTER IX.
WHERE PATHS CONVERGE
"If we do meet again, we'll smile indeed;
If not, 'tis true this parting was well made."
—Julius Caesar.
Violent emotions, like the lunar tides, must have their ebb because they have their flow. The feelings do not so much advance like a river, as oscillate like a pendulum.
Striding homeward after his downfall in the log cabin, David's determination to join his fortunes to those of the two adventurers began to wane. He trembled at an unknown future and hesitated before untried paths.
Already the strange experience through which he had just passed began to seem to him like a half-forgotten dream. The refluent thoughts and feelings of his religious life began to set back into every bay and estuary of his soul.
With a sense of shame, he regretted his hasty decision, and was saying to himself, "I will arise and go to my Father," for all the experiences of life clothed themselves at once in the familiar language of the Scriptures.