of the mountain, seeming to await him, dark, brooding, inscrutable. And when the red dot of the saddle-blanket had lost itself into the venomous green of the distance, she would turn, a little listlessly, to her class.
"Come, children, we will sing," she would say.
And they sang, in their low, weird voices, their plaintive modification of some old home song. "How sadly they sing," she murmured; "how sad it all is."
Or it would be at night when, standing at her darkened window, she heard the sound of hoofs reverberated in her heart, and he passed, a mere shadow, immediately swallowed in the gloom. Sometimes she remained at the window, peering into the darkness; at other times she withdrew in unreasoning timidity into the farther depths of the sala, and stood there, panting, till the hoof-beats had sunk into silence. For a while, with a temerity that seemed to her immense, she left her lamp lighted behind her; but when finally he did come, at the sight of the luminous circle upon the road he circled wide into the night. She could divine him there, in the profundity of gloom; it seemed to her that he had dismounted, that he stood long, looking toward her. She trembled with excitement, keenly aware of her conspicuousness in the light. Then the horse rustled softly
