It was nearly noon of that morning of the departures—a cloudless, glorious morning, the sun just warming the chill of the Notch to a pleasant May air, and not a fleck of mist to dim the view of the peaks on the very extreme verge of the line of vision, when Horace Townsend strolled down the half mile of road northward from the Profile, to Echo Lake, intent upon entering on those mysteries which specially belong to that haunted little sheet of water—the mysteries of the boat, the horn, and the cannon. He was alone, as he had been from the first moment of his coming to the Notch, except as the newly-formed intimacy between Halstead Rowan and himself had temporarily drawn them together. He seemed to have formed no other new acquaintance, but that was to be, perhaps, formal and distant; and there was no certainty that the incident would not add to rather than take away from any feeling of positive loneliness which had before oppressed him.
As he turned down the by-road shooting sharply away to the right, with the Lake glimmering silver in the sunlight through the trees, there was a great crash of sound, a deafening reverberation from the rocks of Eagle Cliff, hanging immediately over the Lake, a fainter following, and then another and another, dying away among the far-off hills in the infinite variety of the highland echo. There were already visitors at the Lake; and the factotum who blended the triple characters of keeper, guide, and boatman, had been discharging the little old cannon on the wharf, as a crowning proof to some party with whom he was just finishing, of the capacity of his lake for dwarfing all the travelled ones' recollections of Killarney and the Echo Rocks of Superior.
Such was indeed the fact, and as the lawyer emerged upon the Lake immediately at the wharf, he met the party who had "done" the Lake strolling away, while the boatman was re-arming himself with his long horn, and beginning to turn his attention to certain new-comers, a part of whom had already taken their seats in the big paddle-wheeled boat of which the steam was to be supplied by cranks and hand-labor, for a trip around the pond with the dignified name, and a new development of the capacities of echo. He had indeed dropped the stipendiary sum in currency into the hand of the factotum, and was about stepping into the boat to join the party already miscellaneous, before he discovered that any acquaintance was numbered among them. When he did so, for one instant he hesitated as if about to defer his trip, then muttered below his breath the few words: "No!—I must take my chances—now as well as ever!" stepped in from the little wharf and took one of the few empty seats remaining near the stern of the boat. He sat looking backward, and he was consequently brought face to face with the three occupants of the stern seat, who were necessarily looking forward. Perhaps his fate was upon that stern seat, for its three occupants were Mrs. Burton Hayley, her daughter, and Captain Hector Coles.
Margaret Hayley paled a little, then flushed the least in the world and finally smiled a proud but pleasant smile and returned a nod and a "good-morning," in response to Townsend's comprehensive bow and salutation, which were intended to take in all three. Captain Hector Coles sat bolt upright, as if he had been riding his horse on parade, and moved no inch from his perpendicular as he returned the greeting in so formal a voice that it constituted no recognition whatever; and Mrs. Burton Hayley, to whom the lawyer had not been introduced, had some excuse for the supercilious but puzzled stare with which she honored him. The young girl saw the glance, and remembered the position.
"Oh, ma, I forgot," she said, introducing. "Mr. Townsend, of Cincinnati, whose acquaintance I made yesterday when he saved the poor little boy from drowning, at the Pool."
Her eyes were fixed very closely upon the face of Townsend as she said these words, and so were those of Captain Hector Coles. If either saw, or thought that they saw, a momentary red flush pass over the dark countenance, coming as quickly and fading as rapidly as one of the flashes of the Northern Lights,—did they see any corroboration of the suspicions of the evening before, or was that flush merely the natural expression of a sensitive man whose good deeds were mentioned in his presence?
Mrs. Burton Hayley nodded, as she could not avoid doing under such circumstances, but there was very little cordiality in the nod; and there was something quite as lofty and uncongenial in the manner of the words with which she accompanied it:
"I remember hearing my daughter speak of Mr. Townsend's having been made the means, under Providence, of preventing an accident."
The ostentatious Bible yet lay upon its carved stand, oh, Mrs. Burton Hayley, did it not!
No farther conversation followed at that moment, though there may have been one, and mayhap two, in that mixed boat-load of fifteen or twenty, who would have been glad to pursue it under more favorable auspices. Certain it is that the lawyer kept his gaze upon the proudly sweet face of Margaret Hayley, quite as steadily as propriety would by any means allow, and that her face answered back something more of interest, under the shade of her wide leghorn jockey, than either of her immediate companions might have been pleased to see. She was interested in her new acquaintance, beyond a question: was she something more? Answer the question—oh, heart of woman!—could it be possible that the by-gone love, once so truly a part of her very being, had already so faded, in one short month, that a feeling warmer than friendship could centre around a mere stranger of two days' beholding? Was that "ideal," once believed to have been found, then lost again, presenting itself in another and still more enticing shape, to make constancy a myth and womanly truth a by-word? Small data, as yet, from which to judge; but stranger things than this have chanced in the rolling years, and the faith of humanity still survived them!