CHAPTER III
Arethusa flung herself flat on a mossy spot of ground underneath the largest and tallest of the trees in Miss Asenath's Woods.
Like the vaulted ceiling of a huge green cathedral, the branches far above her curved in graceful arches. And they were so thickly interlaced and grown with leaves, that although this first slow-falling rain of the storm could be distinctly heard in its noisy pattering on those leaves, very little came through them, save an extra large and splashing drop every now and then.
Having run every step of the way from the house, Arethusa was completely out of breath: and she could only lie panting for some moments, the Letter still clutched to her breast.
The wind had died down, and it was as hot and close out here in the open under the trees as it had seemed in the shut-up sitting room. But she was far from any thought of physical discomfort now.
At the beginning of Miss Asenath's Romance those many years ago, her father, Arethusa's great-grandfather Redfield, had set aside this strip of woodland in which to build his daughter a house.
It was not nearly so heavily wooded then, and the lovers had wandered over it and selected a spot for the little home, mute evidence of their choice of site remaining in a half-dug foundation, overgrown with vines and weeds and almost indistinguishable save for the few heavy stones that marked one side of the depression. But the walls of the little house had risen in fancy for her with such reality, that, when the sad ending to her love-story came and the building was abandoned, at Miss Asenath's request the woodland was fenced off. Hence, its name of "Miss Asenath's Woods." She had never gone there since the day when with her own hands she had spread a layer of mortar between two stones "for luck," but she knew every inch of it as it was now, every tree and bush, from Arethusa's vivid description. Arethusa's imagination could for herself, from Miss Asenath's telling, place the little house on its ghostly foundation in all the actuality it was once to have had.
Arethusa loved the woodland quite as much as Miss Asenath did, even apart from the significance of its connections with her aunt's love-story. It was the only spot on the place that Miss Eliza did not keep straight; the only bit of the Farm that was not inspected, often, by that keen glance which, even if a trifle near-sighted, so little escaped. But she never went near the woodland on any pretext.