"Jealous of Ronayne?" exclaimed Captain Headley with unfeigned surprise. "Ha! ha! ha! excuse me, my dear Ellen, but I cannot avoid being amused at the strangeness of the conceit." "It was even so," returned Mrs. Headley, gravely, "and a source of unhappiness I fear it will prove to us all that it was so." "Proceed," said her husband. "Are you aware that the son of Winnebeg has never entered the fort nor been even in the neighborhood since the night of that marriage?" pursued his wife. "I do not believe he has been seen since," remarked Captain Headley. "I _know_ that he has not; but yet he is ever near, seemingly bent on one purpose." "Love?" interposed the Captain, smiling. "Yes, love! but a fearful love--though the love of a smooth-faced boy--a love that may bring down destruction upon us all." "Ellen, you begin to fill me with alarm," remarked her husband, gravely. "You are not a woman to be startled by trifles, and there is that in your manner just now which fully satisfies me of the importance of what you have to communicate." CHAPTER II. "You know my love for Mrs. Ronayne," continued Mrs. Headley, after a pause of a few minutes. "Even as though she were my own daughter, I regard her, and would do for her all that a fond mother could for her child. Only yesterday afternoon, while Ronayne and the Doctor were out with a party fishing on the old ground above Hardscrabble, she expressed a wish to visit the tomb of her poor mother, who, dying within a week after her marriage, had been buried near the base of the summer-house on the grounds attached to their cottage, and asked me to accompany her. Of course I consented; and as you were busily engaged, you did not particularly notice my absence. We crossed the river in the scow, and ascended leisurely to the garden. It struck me as we walked that the figure of a man, seemingly an Indian, floated rapidly past within the paling of the garden, but I could not distinctly trace the outline, and therefore assumed that I had been deceived, and so said nothing to my companion on the subject.