"_And_," the woman went on, not seeming to heed the interruption, "you tell the same to your friends, that they get no good in these parts. But, of us--and of this"--she pointed to the sodden paper which she had snatched from her mistress's hands--"you will say nothing. It might bring mischief." "Mischief?" I echoed. "Mischief--upon _her_." "But this is nonsense you talk, Rosa!" broke in the little lady. "At the most, what have I written?--a little song from Gluck, the divine Gluck! Just a little song of Eurydice calling to Orfeo. Ah! you should have heard me sing it--in the days before my voice left me; in the opera, boy, and the King himself splitting his gloves to applaud us! Eh, but you are young, very young. I should not wonder to hear you were born after I left the stage. And you are pretty, but not old enough to be Orfeo yet. I must wait--I must wait, though I wait till I doubt if I am not changed to Proserpine with her cracked voice. Boy, if I kissed you--" She advanced a step, but the negress caught her by the wrist violently, at the same moment waving me off. I felt faint and giddy, as though some exhalation from the graveyard--not wholly repellent, but sickly, overpowering, like the scent of a hothouse lily--had been suddenly wafted under my nostrils. I fell back a pace as the negress motioned me away. Her hand pointed across the stream, and across the meadow, to the gap in the ridge. "Fast as you can run," she panted; "and never come this way again." The strong scent yet hung around me and seemed to bind me like a spell, pressing on my arms and logs. I plunged knee-deep into the stream. The cool touch of the water brought me to my senses. I splashed across, waded up the bank, and set off running towards the gap. CHAPTER XXVII. THE MAN IN BLACK. Before ever I gained the gap I was panting, and as I panted the blood ran into my mouth from a deep scratch across the eyebrows. I tasted it as I ran. My shirt hung in strips, and one stocking flapped open on a rip from knee to ankle. But on the farther side of the ridge I ran no longer. I flung myself and fell through the matted ferns that, veiling the trough of a half-dry watercourse, now checked my descent as I clutched at them, now parted and let me drop and bruise myself on the rocky bottom. In the end, I found myself on soft sand beside the blessed water of the creek, bloodied indeed--for I had taken a shrewd knock on the bridge of the nose--but with a wrenched shoulder and a jarred knee-pan for the worst of my hurts. I valued them nothing in comparison with the terrors left behind in the woods. The schooner lay in sight, scarcely half a mile below, and I sobbed with gratitude as I dipped my face in the tide and washed off its bloodstains.