She assumed the hat and shawl she usually wore when in the garden, and passing though the latter, in her resolution to meet Bevil, almost heedless if her father missed her, she was about to open the gate that led to the beech avenue, when she was startled—rooted to the spot for a moment—by seeing, or fancying she saw, before her, amid the dark and uncertain shadows of the November evening, the blacker outline of a dog—of a hound before her.
At this conviction a gasping cry escaped her, and a sense of suffocation came into her slender throat; inspired by a courage beyond what she deemed she possessed, she darted forward, but the outline seemed to melt away before her or elude her eyes. No dog was there, nor could there have been, for no dog of mortal mould could have cleared that lofty wall, and no sound followed the disappearance.
All was still save the drip of the dew as it fell from the overladen leaf of an evergreen.
Alison felt her heart beating painfully, while a deadly chill seemed to settle upon it. Had the family boding of evil been before her? Oh, no, no—impossible. And yet it was said that when Ellon and her mother died—— She tried to thrust the thought away.
It must have been, she said to herself, some peculiar arrangement of light and shadow—some shadow formed in the starlight and thrown on the grass; for often as she heard of that Dog of Doom—the Spectre Hound of Essilmont—she always shrank from believing in its existence, but her heart was filled with vague and undefinable apprehension nevertheless.
There was a step on the gravel, a figure appeared in the shade of the star-lighted avenue, and in another moment she was sobbing heavily in Bevil's arms.
Her excessive agitation he attributed, naturally, to the very unpleasant scene of the forenoon, especially when she said,
'Oh! Bevil, how, or in what terms, am I to apologise to you for the mode in which papa treated you to-day?'
'Poor old gentleman, I can pardon all his petulance, but it fills me with a fear that he designs you to be the wife of another. Curse upon this poverty of mine, which mars as yet the life of us both, Alison. I have done wrong in loving you and winning you without your father's permission; but he never would have accorded it.'
'Oh!' moaned Alison, with her cheek on his breast; 'something is about to happen—something terrible about to befall us!'