Not so long as he fancied. There came through the window the sound of an unfamiliar voice, he thought at first, strangely mouthing, and presently rising into a dolorous cry. He listened, trembling guiltily. It was Eli Strobe’s voice. And when he realized this he could hear no more,—his fortitude was overtaxed. He could wait for no reward, within the sound of those tones. He turned, strode swiftly to the gate, flung himself upon the restive mare, and the quick thud of her hoofs along the beaten ways of the turn-row announced his departure to those within. He was going up the mountain, as she had bidden him. He was going—he cared not where—to the mountains as instinctively as a bird might seek the woods. They called to him, as he passed the forge, for news of Eli Strobe. He shook his head; he had no news to give. The votes had been counted, and the local politicians, even in this hour of stress, did not fail to communicate the fact, and one or two triumphant souls shouted to him, as he spurred away, that Eli Strobe was reëlected. He did not slacken his speed, for all the rough road, nor draw rein in fording the plunging torrent. The mare’s neck was vainly downstretched toward the limpid swiftness; its very breath, the dank perfumes of its banks, indescribably refreshing at the end of the sultry day. The sun was slowly withdrawing its fervid presence. The wind rode abreast up and up the mountain. Jepson seemed to go to meet the night, for the shadows trooped from the east, and only the lengthening miles of valley and steeps behind him were pensively splendid in the rich afterglow of the prodigal day; to meet the night, heralded in the melancholy gloom under the pines, in the vague, indefinable pain with which we loose our hold on each successive day, in the sense of quiet and silence lacking in the gorgeous, albeit noiseless, pageant of sunset-tide; to meet the night, with its pensive presentiments of sorrow, its prophetic intimation of some longer space of null and dark futurity. The mare climbed the rugged ways now with a freshened will. Home, that even the animals cherish, lay at the end of the road, and she began to recognize her rider’s intention thither. As she threaded the tangles of the laurel, a faint, blood-curdling sound smote her quick senses. A wolf was howling afar off in these primeval fastnesses. She snorted as she went, and trembled. A star was at the zenith. A great fir seemed to touch it with the dark, slender line of its spire. An open, rocky space, and Jepson could see the dark western mountains, all glooming, the sunset faded out save for a lingering red streak along the horizon,—a dull and dusky tint in the closing obscurity. Below, mists were a-stalking down the valley ways, spectral in the vague light that barely made them visible. They claimed that weird and ghostly hour; and now and then one peered out from amongst the crags hard by, and drew back