He met the preacher, just emerging from the door, calm, handsome, serious, and Margaret by his side. The dark-haired beauty seemed strangely serene. What could it mean? His heart was in his throat. Was he too late? Wreathed in smiles when the preacher had gone, the girl’s face was a riddle he could not solve.
To his joy, she consented to go.
As he left in his trim little buggy for the hotel, he stooped and kissed Elsie, whispering:
“Make an offering on the altar of love for me, Sis!”
“You’re too slow. The prayers of all the saints will not save you!” she replied with a laugh, throwing him a kiss as he disappeared in the dust.
As they drove through the great forest on the cliffs overlooking the river, the Southern world seemed lit with new splendours to-day for the Northerner. His heart beat with a strange courage. The odour of the pines, their sighing music, the subtone of the falls below, the subtle life-giving perfume of the fullness of summer, the splendour of the sun gleaming through the deep foliage, and the sweet sensuous air, all seemed incarnate in the calm, lovely face and gracious figure beside him.
They took their seat on the old rustic built against the beech, which was the last tree on the brink of the cliff. A hundred feet below flowed the river, rippling softly along a narrow strip of sand which its current had thrown against the rocks. The ledge of towering granite formed a cave eighty feet in depth at the water’s edge. From this projecting wall, tradition said a young Indian princess once leaped with her lover, fleeing from the wrath of a cruel father who had separated them. The cave below was inaccessible from above, being reached by a narrow footpath along the river’s edge when entered a mile downstream.
The view from the seat, under the beech, was one of marvellous beauty. For miles the broad river rolled in calm, shining glory seaward, its banks fringed with cane and trees, while fields of corn and cotton spread in waving green toward the distant hills and blue mountains of the west.
Every tree on this cliff was cut with the initials of generations of lovers from Piedmont.
They sat in silence for awhile, Margaret idly playing with a flower she had picked by the pathway, and Phil watching her devoutly. The Southern sun had tinged her face the reddish warm hue of ripened fruit, doubly radiant by contrast with her wealth of dark-brown hair. The lustrous glance of her eyes, half veiled by their long lashes, and the graceful, careless pose of her stately figure held him enraptured. Her dress of airy, azure blue, so becoming to her dark beauty, gave Phil the impression of eiderdown feathers of some rare bird of the tropics. He felt that if he dared to touch her she might lift her wings and sail over the cliff into the sky and forget to light again at his side.