It was a pitiful story of effort, of strain, of failure, and she told it piece-meal, with long intervals of silence as her feelings or the condition of the road dictated. In the telling we covered a good part of the journey, now riding freely over hills clothed with low brushwood, where myrtles and dogwood and sweet herbs, crushed by the passage of our horses, filled the air with fragrance, now plodding through the gloom of oak-woods where the notes of the mocking bird brought the English nightingale to mind; and now—this more often at the last—crossing patches of low country where masses of tall cypress, black in the moonlight, betrayed the presence of swamps, and where the voices of a thousand frogs, challenging, insistent, unceasing, bade us look to our going. We were descending quickly from the uplands to the low country of South Carolina, the home of the rice-fields and of fever; and except the High Hills of Santee, scarcely a rising ground of any size now stood between us and Charles Town neck, ninety odd miles distant. If she could not tell her tale without agitation I could not hear it without pain, and pain that grew the keener, as I saw that in the telling she was working herself into a fiercer mood. Once or twice a bitter word fell from her and betrayed the soreness she felt; and these complaints, I came to think, were uttered with intention. If I had soothed myself at any time with the thought that she did not see events as I saw them, if I had tried to believe that she accepted my help willingly, I was now convinced that I might dismiss the notion. It was no fancy of mine that she shrank from me. It was at the moment when she had let fall the most cruel of these gibes, that she pulled up the gray and changed the subject, asking me abruptly if we had lately passed a road on the left. I told her—I could not answer her with spirit—that I had not observed one. “What time is it?” was her next question. It was nearly nine, I answered. “We pass through a village before we reach the ferry, do we not?” she asked. “There should be a house or two about a mile before us,” I explained. After that she rode on in silence. But when we had traveled another half mile we came to a post set up at a corner; and there a by-way on the left did run into our road. By this time the moon was high and the sign-post stood up white and ghastly. “Here is the turning,” she said, reining in her horse. “Do you know this road?” “Only that it is not ours,” I answered wondering what she had in her mind. “I am not sure of that,” she replied abruptly. “There is an old ferry half a mile up the stream, and I am told that this road leads to it. Ten years ago the present ferry crossed there, but it was moved to a point lower down to shorten the road. Now do you see?” “What?” I asked. “That we might cross the river there. The boat is on this side, I believe. Whereas if we go to the new ferry and can make no one hear, we shall be detained until morning.”