style="font-size:15px;"> "Nor is he!" said Mr. Laudersdale, in lowest tones, replying to his wife's gaze, and for the first time intimating his feeling. "Never, never, can I repair the ruin he has made me!"
Mrs. Laudersdale rose and stretched out her arm, blindly.
"The room is quite dark," she murmured; "the flowers must soil the air.
Will you take me up-stairs?"
Meanwhile, the unconscious object of their remark was turning over a pile of pages with one hand, while the other trifled along the gleaming keys.
"Here it is," said he, drawing one from the others, and arranging it before him,—a gondel-lied.
There stole from his fingers the soft, slow sound of lapsing waters, the rocking on the tide, the long sway of some idle weed. Here a jet of tune was flung out from a distant bark, here a high octave flashed like a passing torch through night-shadows, and lofty arching darkness told in clustering chords. Now the boat fled through melancholy narrow ways of pillared pomp and stately beauty, now floated off on the wide lagoons alone with the stars and sea. Into this broke the passion of the gliding lovers, deep and strong, giving a soul to the whole, and fading away again, behind its wild beating,—with the silence of lapping ripple and dipping oar.
Mrs. Purcell, standing beside the player, laid a careless arm across the instrument, and bent her face above him like a flower languid with the sun's rays. Suddenly the former smile suffused it, and, as the gondel-lied fell into a slow floating accompaniment, she sang with a swift, impetuous grace, and in a sweet, yet thrilling voice, the Moth Song. The shrill music and murmur from the parlors burst all at once in muffled volume upon the melody, and, turning, they both saw Marguerite standing in the doorway, like an angry wraith, and flitting back again. Mrs. Purcell laughed, but took up the thread of her song again where it was broken, and carried it through to the end. Then Mr. Raleigh tossed the gondel-lied aside, and rising, they continued their stroll.
"You have more than your share of the good things of life, Raleigh," said Mr. McLean, as the person addressed poured out wine for Mrs. Purcell. "Two affairs on hand at once? You drink deep. Light and sparkling,—thin and tart,—isn't it Solomon who forbids mixed drink?"
"I was never the worse for claret," replied Mr. Raleigh, bearing away the glittering glass.
The party from the Lake had not arrived at an early hour, and it was quite late when Mr. Raleigh made his way through ranks of tireless dancers, toward Marguerite. She had been dancing with a spirit that would have resembled joyousness but for its reckless abandon. She seemed to him then like a flame, as full of wilful sinuous caprice. At the first he scarcely liked it, but directly the artistic side of his nature recognized the extreme grace and beauty that flowed through every curve of movement. Standing now, the corn-silk hair slightly disordered and still blown about by the fan of some one near her, her eyes sparkling like stars in the dewdrops of wild wood-violets, warm, yet weary, and a flush deepening her cheek with color, while the flowers hung dead around her, she held a glass of wine and watched the bead swim to the brim. Mr. Raleigh approached unaware, and startled her as he spoke.
"It is au gré du vent, indeed," he said,—"just the white fluttering butterfly,—and now that the wings are clasped above this crimson blossom, I have a chance of capture." And smiling, he gently withdrew the splendid draught.
"Buvez, Monsieur," she said; "c'est le vin de la vie!"
"Do you know how near daylight it is?" he replied. "Mrs. Laudersdale fainted in the heat, and your father took her home long ago. The Heaths went also; and the carriage has just returned for the only ones of us that are left, you and me."
"Is it ready now?"
"Yes."
"So am I."
And in a few moments she sat opposite him in the coach, on their way home.
"It wouldn't be possible for me to sit on the box and drive?" she asked.
"I should like it, in this wild starlight, these flying clouds, this breath of dawn."
Meeting no response, she sank into silence. No emotion can keep one awake forever, and, after all her late fatigue, the roll of the easy vehicle upon the springs soon soothed her into a dreamy state. Through the efforts at wakefulness, she watched the gleams that fell within from the carriage-lamps, the strange shadows on the roadside, the boughs tossing to the wind and flickering all their leaves in the speeding light; she watched, also, Mr. Raleigh's face, on which, in the fitful flashes, she detected a look of utter weariness.
"Monsieur," she exclaimed, "il faut que je vous gêne!"
"Immensely," said Mr. Raleigh with a smile; "but, fortunately, for no great time."
"We shall be soon at home? Then I must have slept."
"Very like. What did you dream?"
"Oh, one must not tell dreams before breakfast, or they come to pass, you know."
"No,—I am uninitiated in dream-craft. Mr. Heath"–
"Monsieur," she cried, with sudden heat, "il me semble que je comprends les Laocoons! J'en suis de même!"
As she spoke, she fell, struck forward by a sudden shock, the coach was rocking like a boat, and plunging down unknown gulfs. Mr. Raleigh seized her, broke through the door, and sprang out.
"Qu'avez vous?" she exclaimed.
"The old willow is fallen in the wind," he replied.
"Quel dommage that we did not see it fall!"
"It has killed one of the horses, I fear," he continued, measuring, as formerly, her terror by her levity. "Capua! is all right? Are you safe?"
"Yah, massa!" responded a voice from the depths, as Capua floundered with the remaining horse in the thicket at the lake-edge below. "Yah, massa,—nuffin harm Ol' Cap in water; spec he born to die in galluses; had nuff chance to be in glory, ef 'twasn't. I's done beat wid dis yer pony, anyhow, Mass'r Raleigh. Seems, ef he was a 'sect to fly in de face of all creation an' pay no 'tention to his centre o' gravity, he might walk up dis yer hill!"
Mr. Raleigh left Marguerite a moment, to relieve Capua's perplexity. Through the remaining darkness, the sparkle of stars, and wild fling of shadows in the wind, she could but dimly discern the struggling figures, and the great creature trampling and snorting below. She remembered strange tales out of the "Arabian Nights," "Bellerophon and the Chimaera," "St. George and the Dragon"; she waited, half-expectant, to see the great talon-stretched wings flap up against the slow edge of dawn, where Orion lay, a pallid monster, watching the planet that flashed like some great gem low in a crystalline west, and she stepped nearer, with a kind of eager and martial spirit, to do battle in turn.
"Stand aside, Una!" cried Mr. Raleigh, who had worked in a determined characteristic silence, and the horse's head, sharp ear, and starting eye were brought to sight, and then his heaving bulk.
"All right, massa!" cried Capua, after a moment's survey, as he patted the trembling flanks. "Pretty tough ex'cise dat! Spect Massam Clean be mighty high,—his best cretur done about killed wid dat tree;—feared he show dis nigger a stick worf two o' dat!"
"We had like to have finished our dance on nothing," said Mr. Raleigh now, looking back on the splintered wheels and panels. "Will you mount? I can secure you from falling."
"Oh,
