The unsuspicious would have been forced to suppose, from the forlorn manner in which Miss Jessie cast her eyes around, that she regretted the absence of any convenient hostelry for the stranger's harborage.
The veteran, however, saw through her, or fancied that he did. At all events, he knew that the solitude of the Park, with only a few liberated slaves and the old housekeeper for company, could not be much more desirable for his daughter than the presence of a promising young man like Lance.
Accordingly, it was settled that Lance should come. Here he was, then, fully established, and—thanks to the perfect hospitality of the old officer—rejoicing in an unexpected sense of being thoroughly at home in those warm latitudes. It was now the end of July—a hot time to be so far South—but Lance's satisfaction with his new surroundings was so great, that he had decided to remain through the summer, and already began to think that that period would seem all too short.
While his scientific eye had been riveted upon the processes of turpentine manufacture, on the number and kinds of food-fish inhabiting the shallows of the sea, and on the feasibility of turning Elbow Crook Swamp into a luxuriant market-garden, a finer vision—which he possessed in common with some others of us who belong to the masculine side of our species—had been occupied with the dainty yet commanding outline of Jessie Floyd's face; the saucy charm of her dark hair parted on one side; her novel, half-childish, yet imperious ways.
He was thinking of her, now, as he traversed the bit of open, marsh-bordered land alongside the pines, where Dennis and Adela had taken their unpropitious walk, that day.
The sun had set long before; the twilight had deepened and deepened until all at once it seemed to meet, in its meditativeness, a thought, an inspiration, a celestial surprise—and the moon rose, silent and beautiful, like the embodiment of that thought.
A panorama of memory passed before Lance's mind, embracing pictures of all the things he had observed during the day, and all that he had seen since he came to North Carolina. He stood there alone, with the ocean moaning subduedly beyond the sandy dunes, four miles away, yet audible through the plash of the nearer waters of the Sound, across which the warm breeze brought its voice to him. He saw in fancy the green waves, the ardent sunshine, the low shore with huts or hamlets clustering occasionally in some favoring nook, surrounded by evergreen oaks and other verdant growths; the chalky lighthouses, the random sails of shore-fishers; the green, inaccessible marshes that fringed so much of the mainland. The poor folk he had met in his rambles, hearty, simple, ignorant and superstitious, came back to his eye in groups, with the surroundings amid which he had happened to encounter them. The gloomy recesses of Elbow Crook Swamp filled in the background of his memory-pictures; wild birds rose and flew across the sky, as it seemed; and all the while Lance was oppressed with a sense of the great natural resources of the region, against which its loneliness, the prevailing ague, and the shiftless languor of the population opposed themselves as a dead-weight on all improvement. Yet, stranger and alone though he was, his soul expanded with the idea of somehow bettering the condition of affairs and making life there brighter and more prosperous.
Then he, too, emerged from revery as the twilight had from its sombreness, and faced clearly the new thought that glowed upon him like the large, sweet moon so dreamily brooding in the sky.
Suddenly he was aware of a shape looming up in the faint moonlight not far from him; the form of a woman, half of whose body was concealed by a curve of the ground, in such a way that it might have been thought she was just rising out of the earth.
The woman was looking seaward. She did not observe his presence.