The girl did not speak. The light went out of her face and a strange grayness overspread it instead. She turned about with a shrinking motion and walked slowly away down the steep slope of the mountain into the straggling wood. Almost immediately Reynolds felt how brutal his act had been and regretted it, hated himself for it. He arose as if to follow her, but faltered and hesitated, allowing his eyes to wander over the grand mountain landscape now flooded with the full light of the sun. What sort of change was this that was coming into his life? Something like a warning shadow had fallen into his soul, and yet some sweet foreboding was with it, some tender, subtle charm luring him with a deep and sweet fascination. He stood a while gazing dreamily, but seeing nothing, then, shaking himself as one freeing himself from slumber, he walked rapidly in the direction taken by Milly. Half way down the slope in a shadowy clump of dwarf pines he found the girl sitting on an old log, her face buried in her hands, sobbing bitterly. He stopped close to her and stood for a moment looking at her. How pitiful a picture she made, with her drooping little form, almost covered by the thin gold veil of bright disheveled hair, outlined against a tangle of broken boughs! He sat down beside her and took one of her wet little hands in his. CHAPTER VII. AN OLD PLANTATION HOUSE. General DeKay's house was on a slight knoll overlooking in one direction the Alabama river, and a broad stretch of fertile cotton lands, whilst every other view was lost in the dense shadows of semi-tropical woods. The building was wholly wanting in architectural beauty, yet it was picturesque enough, with its wide verandas and tall, heavy, stuccoed columns, its many-gabled roof and huge stack of chimneys. Tall magnolia trees grew about it, vines clambered over it, and its small-paned, many-mullioned windows and open halls, gave it an air of old-fashioned conservatism and hospitality quite in a line with what one has always read and heard of southern country life among the wealthy planters of the Gulf States. Spaciousness was the most marked feature of the building. The rooms were many and large, arranged for the comforts of unlimited light and air. When the windows and doors were all thrown open, a breeze blowing from any quarter flowed through the house with unchecked freedom. The floors were of ash, mostly uncarpeted, and the walls and ceilings were heavily paneled with oak. Wide winding stairways and huge fire-places, cumbrous chandeliers and sconces, together with what appeared an over-crowded amount of massive old-time furniture, suggested a formal stateliness rather out of keeping with that freedom of welcome which was and is the distinctive charm of southern hospitality. The mansion had been built and furnished long before the war, in the most prosperous and extravagant days of slavery, when the planter knew no limit to his ability to