Then he gave them each five shillings and moved on. A little further down the street, he met an old Negro Woman selling sprigs of holly with bright red berries. He bought a sprig. “I’ll take it to Deborah,” he said to himself.
He returned to Harrisburg by the stage coach, accompanied by a Negro body-servant well recommended by the British Consul. At Harrisburg he purchased four extra good horses. With these and the Negro he retraced his previous journey. He left the Negro and the horses at McCormick’s Tavern, continuing the balance of the journey on foot, his precious sprig of holly, with the bright red berries, fastened on the top of his staff, that had often been decked with the edelweiss and the Alpine rose. Deborah had said that she knew all the mountain paths back to McCormick’s, so they could reach there quickly, and be mounted on fast horses almost before her employer missed them.
His heart was beating fast as he neared his trysting place, the little clearing on the ridge, the morning before Christmas. Peering through the trees, he observed that Deborah was not there, but surely she would soon come, the sun was scarcely over the Chestnut Ridge to the east! A grey fog hung over the valley, obscuring the little cabin in the cove.
He waited and waited all day long, but no Deborah appeared. He walked all over the top of the ridge to see if there were other clearings, lest he had gotten to the wrong one. There were no others, just as she had said. Cold beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead; he was angry; he was jealous; the day was closing bitterly cold. “The woman that I want, she will not come.”
Finally as the sun was going down behind the western summits of the Alleghenies, he untied the sprig of holly from the end of his mountain-staff, and bending over, stuck it in the fast freezing earth, a symbol of his faithless adventure, and started down the mountain, straight towards Deborah Supersaxo’s cabin.
At the foot of the hill he met her coming towards him–her face was deadly pale, her thin lips white as death–instantly his hate changed to tender love again.
“Kill me if you wish,” she cried out before he had time to speak, and held out her arms to show her non-resistance, “for I have been unworthy. I broke my faith with you, and was not going to come; I repented at leaving Supersaxo, who had been so good to me when I was in distress. I was going to leave you in the lurch. Then, then,” and here tears trickled down her ghastly cheeks, “I was sitting on the courting log by the fire, commending myself for my loyalty, when a few minutes ago one of his friends came in to say that the day before yesterday, while looking at somebody’s bear pen near the Karoondinha, it fell in on him and broke his neck. I was just coming up the hill to tell you, if you were still waiting, how wicked I had been to you, and how I had been punished. Kill me if you wish, I can never be happy any more.”
The Viscount Adare did not hesitate a moment, but flinging down his staff, he rushed to the girl and caught her in his arms. “Doubly blessed are we this night, dear Deborah, for there is now no impediment to our happiness; no misdirected sense of duty can cast a shadow on the joy that lies before us. I want you now more than ever before, after this final trial, and you must come with me!”
“Never say must again,” said Deborah, sweetly, looking up into his eyes, “I am your willing slave; I will go with you to the ends of the earth: I want to redeem this day by years of devotion, years of love.”
Picking up his staff, The Viscount Adare and the mountain girl resumed their journey, past the now deserted log house and the lamp black shack where they had first met, up the steep mountain, and off towards McCormick’s Tavern, near where, in a deep pine grove, the Negro body-servant would be waiting with the horses.