"Such schooling" says she. "I never knew before that there was such a personage as a sweetheart pro tem! But you seem to know the rôle by heart, Mr. Drogue. And so, no doubt, feel warranted to instruct others. But this is the end of it, my friend. For one day you shall have to confess you to your wife! And I think my future Lady Northesk is like to have a pretty temper and will give you a mauvais quart d'heur when she hears of this May day's folly in a Johnstown public house!" CHAPTER XXVI ORDERS In June I was out o' bed and managed to set foot on ground for the first time since early spring. By the end of the month I had my strength in a measure and was able to hobble about town. Pernicious rheumatism is no light matter, for with the agony,--and weakness afterward,--a dull despair settles upon the victim; and it was mind, not body, that caused me the deeper distress, I think. Life seemed useless; effort hopeless. Dark apprehensions obsessed me; I despaired of my country, of my people, of myself. And this all was part of my malady, but I did not know it. All through June and July an oppressive summer heat brooded over Tryon. Save for thunder storms of unusual violence, the heat remained unbroken day and night. In the hot and blinding blue of heaven, a fierce sun blazed; at night the very moon looked sickly with the heat. Never had I heard so many various voices of the night, nor so noisy a tumult after dark, where the hylas trilled an almost deafening chorus and the big frogs' stringy croaking never ceased, and a myriad confusion of insects chirred and creaked and hummed in the suffocating dark. At dawn the birds' outburst was like the loud outrush of a torrent filling the waking world; at twilight scores of unseen whippoorwills put on their shoes[30] and shouted in whistling whisper voices to one another across the wastes of night like the False Faces [31] gathering at a secret tryst. [Footnote 30: Indian lore. The yellow moccasin flower is the whippoorwill's shoe.] [Footnote 31: A secret society common to all nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.] If the whole Northland languished, drooping and drowsy in the heat, the very air, too, seemed heavy with the foreboding gloom of dreadful rumours. Every day came ominous tidings from North, from West, from South of great forces uniting to march hither and crush us. And the terrible imminence of catastrophe, far from arousing and nerving us for the desperate event, seemed rather to confuse and daze our people, and finally to stupefy all, as though the horror of the immense and hellish menace were beyond human comprehension. Men laboured on the meagre defences of the county as though weighted by a nightmare--as though drowsing awake and not believing in their ghostly dream.