"Oh no," said Edith, "no! Always yours, my dear father--your child." And then she added, while the glowing blood rushed over her beautiful face, like the gush of morning over a white cloud, "your child, though his wife."
It cost her an effort to utter the word; yet she was pleased to speak it; but then, the moment after, as if to hide it from memory again, she said, "Oh, that dear Walter were here! He would be very happy, I know, and say I had come to the end of my day-dreaming."
"He will be here probably to-night," observed her lover.
"We must not count upon it," rejoined her father; "he may meet with many things to detain him. But now, my children, I will go in, and make up my journal, till the dinner hour."
Edith leaned fondly on his bosom, and whispered, "And write that this has been one happy day, my father."
Alas, alas! that the brightest sunshine and the softest sky should so often precede the day of storms! Alas, that the dark tempest-clouds should be so frequently gathering beneath the horizon all around us, when the sky above seems full of hope and promise! But so it is too often in this life. The old geographers' fancied figure of the earth was very like the earth on which human hopes are raised--a fair and even plain, with a yawning precipice all round it.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
The day went by; night fell; and Walter Prevost did not appear in his father's house. No alarm, however, was entertained; for, out of the wide range of chances, there were many events which might have occurred to detain him. A shade of anxiety, perhaps, came over Edith's mind; but it passed away the next morning, when she heard from the negro Chando, or Alexander (who, having been brought up amongst the Indians from his infancy, was better acquainted with their habits than any person in the house), that not a single red man had been in the neighbourhood since the preceding morning at eight o'clock.
"All gone west, missy," he said; "the last to go were old chief Black Eagle. I hear of him coming to help you, and I go out to see."
Edith asked no questions in regard to the sources of his information; for he was famous for finding out all that was going on in the neighbourhood, and, with a childlike vanity, making somewhat of a secret of the means by which he obtained intelligence; but she argued reasonably, though wrongly, that, as Walter was not to set out from Albany till about the same hour that the Indians left, he could not have fallen in with any of their parties.