In a moment Abner had to some extent regained his self-possession, though his pulses still beat riotously. He hastened after Betsy, who turned as he approached, her face still flushed, her eyes glowing with unwonted fire. She greeted him in her usual nonchalant manner, and walked demurely beside him, swinging her bonnet carelessly.
"You seem to have forgotten, sir, that a big camp-meeting is in progress in these woods. You reminded me of Daniel Boone or Simon Kenton, sitting on that stump with your 'monarch-of-all-I-survey' air, as though you were alone in the heart of some vast wilderness of which you were the sole proprietor. What schemes were you hatching? and what were you doing with that stick? Working out some abstruse mathematical problem, or calculating how much money your year's crops will bring? This is no time for such worldly thoughts, while all these hair-lifting wonders are occurring yonder. Your leisure moments should be employed in pious meditation, or in repenting of your sins."
Too much agitated by the revelation which had just come to him to answer her light banter, he walked silently by her side. She, surprised by his silence, glanced into his face. What she saw there arrested her footsteps and brought a startled look into her eyes. For a moment they stood still in the pathway, gazing into each other's faces—soul revealed to soul in the look. Then her eyes fell, a trembling seized her, and a wave of crimson swept over cheeks and brow and throat. In a voice hoarse with feeling, he exclaimed, "Betty! Betty!" and stretched out his arms toward her. Tremblingly she threw out her hands as though to repel his approach; and then, turning from him, ran down the path toward the encampment.
Abner was in no mood for the noise and excitement of the "revival"; so he turned aside into a ravine where many of the campers' horses were tethered. Here he encountered Henry, to whom he said abruptly, saddling his mare as he spoke, "I'm sick of all this; I'm going for a gallop."
"It's a pity to miss to-night's service," Henry answered. "The camp breaks up to-morrow."
"No matter," Dudley replied as he sprang into the saddle. "I'm off now."
"Better take a snack before you go. You must be hungry," called Henry, but Dudley, already beyond the ravine, gave no heed.
In his overwrought mood hunger and slumber were equally impossible, and the quiet of his attic room would have been as intolerable as the glare of the torchlights and the singing, shouting, and wild ravings of the encampment. He rode on and on through the moonlight, over hills and fields and roads, until his mare, flecked with foam, was breathing uneasily. Then he allowed the reins to drop loosely over her neck, and rode slowly back until he reached his own unfinished cabin. But the air of the unused house was oppressive, and the walls seemed to stifle him. Freeing the mare of saddle and bridle, and turning her out to graze, he threw himself down on the sward in front of the house. Even then he could not sleep, but for a long time lay gazing into the clear, star-studded sky; for the sudden broadening of the perspective of his future kept him wide awake. He wondered at his long blindness, and with an agony of uncertainty questioned whether Betsy's sympathetic comprehension of his old feeling for her cousin might not now hinder the fulfillment of his dearest hope. But at last the solemn serenity of the summer night stilled his unquiet spirit, and he fell asleep.
When he awoke, the flaming radiance in the eastern sky indicated another sultry day; but at this early hour there was a dewy freshness in the air, and all nature was astir and joyous. Upon the bark of a hickory-tree a crimson-crested woodpecker was tapping for his breakfast; under the edge of a half-decayed stump a colony of ants had already begun the day's labor. Lark and bee were on the wing; squirrels ran up and down the trunk of a big elm, leaping from branch to branch, where redbird, thrush and linnet were making the woods merry with their morning concert.