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The stranger took little part in the talk at the table. Never a question was asked him as to his mission in the mountains, or the length of his stay, his vocation, or his home. That extreme courtesy of the mountaineers, exemplified in their singular abstinence from any expressions of curiosity, accepted such account of himself as he had volunteered, and asked for no more. In the face of this standard of manners any inquisitiveness on his part, such as might have elicited points of interest for his merely momentary entertainment, was tabooed. Nevertheless, silent though he was for the most part, the relish with which he listened, his half-covert interest in the girl, his quick observation of the others, the sudden very apparent enlivening of his mental atmosphere, betokened that his quarters were not displeasing to him. It seemed only a short time before the meal was ended and the circle all, save Millicent, with pipes alight before the fire again. The dogs, well fed, had ranged themselves on the glowing hearth, lying prone on the hot stones; one old hound, however, who conserved the air of listening to the conversation, sat upright and nodded from time to time, now and again losing his balance and tipping forward in a truly human fashion, then gazing round on the circle with an open luminous eye, as who should say he had not slept.

It was all very cheerful within, but outside the wind still blared mournfully. Once more Dundas was sorry that he had declined the invitation to remain, and it was with a somewhat tentative intention that he made a motion to return to the hotel. But his host seemed to regard his resolution as final, and rose with a regret, not an insistence. The two women stared in silent amazement at the mere idea of his camping out, as it were, in the old hotel. The ascendency of masculine government here, notwithstanding Roxby’s assertion that Eve was made of Adam’s backbone, was very apparent in their mute acquiescence and the alacrity with which they began to collect various articles, according to his directions, to make the stranger’s stay more comfortable.

“Em’ry kin go along an’ holp,” he said, heartlessly; for poor Emory’s joy in perceiving that the guest was not a fixture, and that his presence was not to be an embargo on any word between himself and Millicent during the entire evening, was pitiably manifest. But the situation was still not without its comforts, since Dundas was to go too. Hence he was not poor company when once in the saddle, and was civil to a degree of which his former dismayed surliness had given no promise.

Night had become a definite element. The twilight had fled. Above their heads, as they galloped through the dank woods, the bare boughs of the trees clashed together–so high above their heads that to the town man, unaccustomed to these great growths, the sound seemed not of the vicinage, but unfamiliar, uncanny, and more than once he checked his horse to listen. As they approached the mountain’s verge and overlooked the valley and beheld the sky, the sense of the predominance of darkness was redoubled. The ranges gloomed against the clearer spaces, but a cloud, deep gray with curling white edges, was coming up from the west, with an invisible convoy of vague films, beneath which the stars, glimmering white points, disappeared one by one. The swift motion of this aerial fleet sailing with the wind might be inferred from the seemingly hurried pace of the moon making hard for the west. Still bright was the illumined segment, but despite its glitter the shadowy space of the full disk was distinctly visible, its dusky field spangled with myriads of minute, dully golden points. Down, down it took its way in haste–in disordered fright, it seemed, as if it had no heart to witness the storm which the wind and the clouds foreboded–to fairer skies somewhere behind those western mountains. Soon even its vague light would encroach no more upon the darkness. The great hotel would be invisible, annihilated as it were in the gloom, and not even thus dimly exist, glimmering, alone, forlorn, so incongruous to the wilderness that it seemed even now some mere figment of the brain, as the two horsemen came with a freshened burst of speed along the deserted avenue and reined up beside a small gate at the side.