“Audrey!” he called. “Morning Light! Sunshine in the Dark! Dancing Water! Audrey that will not be called ‘mademoiselle’ nor have the wooing of the son of a French chief! Then shall she have the wooing of the son of a Monacan woman. I am a hunter. I will woo as they woo in the woods.” Audrey bent to her pole, and made faster progress down the creek. Her heart was hot and angry, and yet she was afraid. All dreadful things, all things that oppressed with horror, all things that turned one white and cold, so cold and still that one could not run away, were summed up for her in the word “Indian.” To her the eyes of Hugon were basilisk eyes,--they drew her and held her; and when she looked into them, she saw flames rising and bodies of murdered kindred; then the mountains loomed above her again, and it was night-time, and she was alone save for the dead, and mad with fear and with the quiet. The green banks went by, and the creek began to widen. “Where are you going?” called the trader. “Wheresoever you go, at the end of your path stand my village and my wigwam. You cannot stay all day in that boat. If you come not back at the bidden hour, Darden’s squaw will beat you. Come over, Morning Light, come over, and take me in your boat, and tie your hair with my gift. I will not hurt you. I will tell you the French love songs that my father sang to my mother. I will speak of land that I have bought (oh, I have prospered, ma’m’selle!), and of a house that I mean to build, and of a woman that I wish to put in the house,--a Sunshine in the Dark to greet me when I come from my hunting in the great forests beyond the falls, from my trading with the nation of the Tuscaroras, with the villages of the Monacans. Come over to me, Morning Light!” The creek widened and widened, then doubled a grassy cape all in the shadow of a towering sycamore. Beyond the point, crowning the low green slope of the bank, and topped with a shaggy fell of honeysuckle and ivy, began a red brick wall. Half way down its length it broke, and six shallow steps led up to an iron gate, through whose bars one looked into a garden. Gazing on down the creek past the farther stretch of the wall, the eye came upon the shining reaches of the river. Audrey turned the boat’s head toward the steps and the gate in the wall. The man on the opposite shore let fall an oath. “So you go to Fair View house!” he called across the stream. “There are only negroes there, unless”--he came to a pause, and his face changed again, and out of his eyes looked the spirit of some hot, ancestral French lover, cynical, suspicious, and jealously watchful--“unless their master is at home,” he ended, and laughed. Audrey touched the wall, and over a great iron hook projecting therefrom threw a looped rope, and fastened her boat.