A cold supper was set before him at once. While he was eating it Elster went and busied herself about the house, preparatory to their departure. The meal was soon dispatched, and when he had looked carefully to his rifle and hunting accoutrements, to reassure himself that all was in good order for service, Jervis went to assist his wife in making such disposition of their little household concerns as their absence should render necessary. To his surprise, he found her preparing to accompany him all the way. "Hardly, dear Elster!" said he. "The horses have leaped the fence and strayed out into the woods, so that I shall be obliged to go afoot, and for you to walk with me is quite out of the question. Twenty long miles--many of them rough and steep, all of them dark and dangerous! You could hardly endure it to the end." "If the child has walked it," rejoined Elster, "so may the mother; and if he has not, and is lost to us forever, then this lonely house is our home no longer! I return to it no more." Though of a gentle and yielding nature under ordinary circumstances, Elster could meet a great trial, like the present one, with a spirit firm and courageous enough; and knowing this, her husband forbore any further remonstrance to her determination. The sun had set and the moon was rising, when, having made their solitary dwelling as secure as possible, they set out on their melancholy journey. In those days the buffalo traces, as they were called, formed the only highways of the wilderness, and the one our poor friends were now following led, for the greater part of the way, through a dense and tangled forest, where the moonlight showed itself only in straggling beams and shed but a ghostly glimmer. At intervals the sombre wildness of the scene would be relieved by a bluegrass glade, all agleam with moonbeams and glistering dew drops, saving where flecked with the shadows of clumped or scattered trees. Pleasing, however, as was the contrast they presented to the savage solitudes around them, these bright spots left upon the spirit an impression of sadness quite peculiar. Each had so much the appearance of a well kept park or woodland pasture that the lonely wayfarers would sometimes find themselves all but expecting that the next turn of the road would bring them in sight of the stately mansion or comfortable farmhouse to which these beautiful grounds pertained. Nothing of the kind appearing there, the spot, from the very suggestiveness of the homelike, would seem to them more desolate than the most unhomelike parts of the forest.