"Oh, he has not been crowded out! He has gone up there to drive; for the road is not very safe at night, and our coachman is rather too much exhilarated to be trusted," answered Sybil, touching very tenderly upon the weakness of her old servant. Their road lay along the bank of the river up the valley, between the two high mountain ridges; but it was so dark that nothing but these grander features of the landscape could be discerned. As the carriage rolled slowly and carefully along this rough road, the music of distant waters fell upon the listening ear, and from the faintest hum that could hardly be heard, it gradually swelled into a deafening roar that filled the valley. "What is that?" fearfully inquired Rosa. "What is what?" echoed Sybil. "That horrid noise!" "Oh! that is the Black Torrent, the head of our Black River," answered Sybil in a low, pleased tone; for the sound of her native waters, however dreadful it might be to strange ears, was delightful to hers. "Oh! more blackness!" shivered Rosa. "But it is a beautiful cascade! All beautiful things are not necessarily light, you know." "No, indeed," answered Rosa, "for the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life is very dark." And she raised and pressed the hand of her hostess, to give point to her words. Sybil did not like the implied flattery, delicately as it was conveyed. She drew her hand away; and then, to heal the little hurt she might have made in doing so, she opened the window and said, pleasantly: "Look, Mrs. Blondelle! You see the lights of our home now." Rosa leaned across Sybil to look in the direction indicated, and she saw scattered lights that seemed to be set in the side of the mountain. She saw no house, and she said so. "That is because the house is built of the very same dark iron-gray rocks that form the mountain; and being immediately at the foot of the mountain, and closely surrounded with trees, can not at night be distinguished from the mountain itself." Here the carriage road curved around an expansion of the river that might have been taken either for a very small lake, or a very large pond. And about midway of this curve, or semi-circle, the carriage drew up. On the left-hand was dimly seen the lake; on the right-hand the gate letting into the elm-tree avenue that led straight up to the house. "That is the Black Pond, and there is Black Hall. More 'blackness,' Mrs. Blondelle," smiled Sybil, who was so delighted to get home that she forgot her jealousy. The carriage waited only until the gates could be opened by the slow old porter, whom Sybil laughingly greeted as "Cerberus," although the name given him in baptism was that of the keeper of the keys of heaven, and not that of the guardian of the entrance to the other place. "Cerberus," or rather Peter, warmly welcomed his young mistress back, and widely stretched the gates for her carriage to pass.