Haward remembered not, but he said that he did so. “The moon is full again,” he continued, “and last night I heard a mockingbird in the garden. I will come in the barge to-morrow evening, and the negroes shall row us up and down the river--you and me and Mistress Deborah--between the sunset and the moonrise. Then it is lonely and sweet upon the water. The roses can be smelled from the banks, and if you will speak to the mockingbirds we shall have music, dryad Audrey, brown maid of the woods!” Audrey’s laugh, was silver-clear and sweet, like that of a forest nymph indeed. She was quite happy again, with all her half-formed doubts and fears allayed. They had never been of him,--only of herself. The two sat within the green and swaying fountain of the willow, and time went by on eagle wings. Too soon came the slave to call them to the house; the time within, though spent in the company of Darden and his wife, passed too soon; too soon came the long shadows of the afternoon and Haward’s call for his horse. Audrey watched him ride away, and the love light was in her eyes. She did not know that it was so. That night, in her bare little room, when the candle was out, she kneeled by the window and looked at the stars. There was one very fair and golden, an empress of the night. “That is the princess,” said Audrey, and smiled upon the peerless star. Far from that light, scarce free from the murk of the horizon, shone a little star, companionless in the night. “And that is I,” said Audrey, and smiled upon herself. CHAPTER XIV THE BEND IN THE ROAD “‘Brave Derwentwater he is dead; From his fair body they took the head: But Mackintosh and his friends are fled, And they’ll set the hat upon another head’”-- chanted the Fair View storekeeper, and looked aside at Mistress Truelove Taberer, spinning in the doorway of her father’s house. Truelove answered naught, but her hands went to and fro, and her eyes were for her work, not for MacLean, sitting on the doorstep at her feet. “‘And whether they’re gone beyond the sea’”-- The exile broke off and sighed heavily. Before the two a little yard, all gay with hollyhocks and roses, sloped down to the wider of the two creeks between which stretched the Fair View plantation. It was late of a holiday afternoon. A storm was brewing, darkening all the water, and erecting above the sweep of woods monstrous towers of gray cloud. There must have been an echo, for MacLean’s sigh came back to him faintly, as became an echo. “Is there not peace here, ‘beyond the sea’?” said Truelove softly. “Thine must be a dreadful country, Angus MacLean!” The Highlander looked at her with kindling eyes. “Now had I the harp of old Murdoch!” he said. “‘Dear is that land to the east, Alba of the lakes! Oh, that I might dwell there forever’”--