Durgan smiled to himself over the quaint phrase used so seriously. "But the father?" "He married in pique a dull pink and white society woman, with more money; and then became a chronic invalid. When he was tired of his wife he sent for his daughters. I never heard that he was unkind to them, or to his wife; but it seemed to me he only cared for them as they devoted themselves to his comfort. Hermione--often has she discussed it with me--was very anxious as to his spiritual state. It was her great desire that he should seek salvation. It was that desire that caused her always such distress when her father finally dabbled in spiritualism. His death, in a still ungodly state, was, I can aver, her worst trouble in all that terrible chain of events. She felt so much that she never mentioned her concern about him again." Alden had been speaking in a sleepy way, as if his recent distrust of his chosen lady was obliterated by some fragrance from the poppy beds of weariness and love and night. He slept at last. The bleakness of the mountain night had given place to a balmy rain. Durgan pondered. He knew that his wife would bow down to one like Claxton, who had had the social ball at his feet; she would regard his intimate knowledge of the society she desired to cajole as a most valuable property, and would risk much to retain it. When the gray morning came they went out to the trees again, but no one was hiding among them. Then they went down by the road, and climbed along to the foot of the precipice; but, making the closest search along its base, they found nothing. Alden became racked by a new fear: the unknown had perhaps cheated them, and recrossed the road. The desperate condition of the man, the women unprotected--these thoughts were so terrible that he ran up the hill to protect them, unconscious that his valor was out of all proportion to his frame. When he was gone the driver said, "Forty dollars didn't get the better of me crossin' that road while I kep' an eye on it, I reckon." The mountain forest dripped and trickled, the dry ground soaking in the moisture with almost audible expansion of each atom of earth, each pore of fern and leaf, and the swelling of twigs. The wet and glisten everywhere deepened the color of rock and wood, moss, lichen, and weed. The driver stood considering the face of the rock; the terrier began nosing among some fallen leaves; Durgan was looking this way and that, to see which might have invited the nearest temporary hiding. Alden had believed the stranger's weakness a pretence; Durgan believed the strength he had shown to be the transient effect of fear. The driver at length said, "Hi! Look here. What's that?" He pointed to a black bundle in a fissure of the precipice.