And Heloise fell to speculating as to whether she could be happy if she were Mrs. Schuyler and lived in that handsome house on Schuyler Hill. It would be a fine thing, no doubt, to have all the money one wanted, and not to be obliged to turn and fix and mend the Sunday dress until there was but little of the original left; and she tried to fancy herself the mistress of Schuyler Hill, with Colonel Schuyler away and some one else in his place, and her eyes went over the tree-tops to the tall tower and the figure working there.
“Better as it is,” she thought, and leaning back in her chair she went off into a pleasant kind of reverie, from which she was roused by the sound of horse’s feet, galloping swiftly down the road as if on an errand of life or death.
The rider was one of the men from Schuyler Hill, and swiftly as he rode Heloise detected a look of terror on his face and wondered what had happened.
Involuntarily she glanced again toward the tower, and missed the form she had seen there a short time before. But there was nothing strange in that. She often missed him when he went down for nails or orders from his overseer, and she thought no more of it until an hour later, when her mother came up the walk, looking very red and disturbed, and asking, abruptly:
“Have you heard of the dreadful accident at the Hill?”
Heloise never could explain why it was that she seemed intuitively to know that the accident had reference to the only one through whom she could be deeply touched. But she did know it, and her lips were pale as ashes, and trembled in a grieved kind of way as she said: “It is Abelard.”
“Yes; who told you?” her mother asked.
And Heloise replied:
“No one told me. I knew without telling. Is he much hurt? Where is he?”
And she caught her bonnet from the nail and started for the door.