"I hope you have made yourself as comfortable as possible in this place," said the youth, anxiously.

"Yes, Rule! always as happy and as much at ease as my past will permit."

"Oh! what is--what was this terrible past?" inquired the youth--not for the first time.

"It was, it is, and it ever will be! This past will be present and future so long as I live on this earth. And some day, when time and strife and woe have made you strong and hard and stern, I will lift the veil and show you its horrible face! But not now, my boy! not now! Come in."

As the weird woman said this she led the way into the hut, where the rude table stood covered with a coa.r.s.e white cloth and adorned with two white plates and two pairs of steel knives and forks. Here the Christmas dinner was eaten, and afterward the two began a close conversation.

"Mother," said the youth, "I shall have to leave here to-morrow night. I should go away so much more contented if I could see you living down in the village among people. Here you are dwelling alone, far from human help if you should require it. The winter coming on!"

"Rule! I hate the village! I hate the haunts of human beings! I love the wilderness and the wild creatures that are around me!"

"But, mother, if you should be taken ill up here alone!"

"I should get well or die; and it would not in the least matter which."

"But you might linger, you might suffer."

"I am used to suffering, and however long I might linger, the end would come at last. Recovery or death, it would not matter which."

"Oh, Mother Scythia!" said the youth, in a voice full of distress.

"Rule! I am as happy here as my past will permit me to be. I abhor the haunts of the human! I love the solitude of the wilderness. The time may come when you too, lad, shall hate the haunts of the human and long for the lair of the lion! You will rise, Rule! As sure as flame leaps to the air, you will rise! The fire within you will kindle into flame! You will rise! But--beware the love of woman and the pride of place! See!

Listen!"

The face of the weird woman changed--became ashen gray, her form became rigid, her eyes were fixed, her gaze was afar off in distant s.p.a.ce.

"What is it, mother?" anxiously demanded the youth.

"I see your future and the emblem of your future--a splendid meteor, soaring up from the earth to the sky, filling s.p.a.ce with light and glory! Dazzling a million of eyes, then dropping down, down, down into darkness and nothingness! That is you!"

"Mother Scythia!" exclaimed the youth, in troubled tones.

The weird woman never turned her head, nor withdrew her fearful, far-off stare into futurity.

"That is you. You are but a poor apprentice. But from this year you will soar, and soar, and soar to the zenith of place and power among your fellows! You will be the blazing meteor of the day! You will dazzle all eyes by the splendor of your success, and then, 'in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye,' you will drop into night, and nothingness, and be heard of no more!"

"Mother! Mother Scythia! Wake up! You are dreaming!" said Rule, laying his hand on the woman's shoulder and gently shaking her.

"Oh, what is this? Rule! What is it?"

"You have been dreaming, Mother Scythia."

"Have I?" said the woman, putting her hands to her forehead and stroking away the raven locks that over-shadowed it.

And gradually she recovered from her trance and returned to her normal condition. When Rule was quite sure that she was all right again, he said:

"Mother Scythia, I am going to Rockhold to see the friends there who have been kind to me. But I will come back to spend the night with you."

"Well, lad, go. Why should I try to hinder you? You must work out your destiny and bear your doom," she said, wearily, with her forehead bowed upon her hands, as if she felt the heavy prophetic cloud still over-shadowing and oppressing her.

"Mother Scythia, why do you speak so solemnly of me, and I only in my nineteenth year?" gravely inquired the youth, who, though he had been accustomed to the weird woman's strange moods and stranger words and deemed them little less than the betrayals of insanity, yet now felt unaccountably troubled by them.

"Yes; you are young, but the years fly fast; and I--I see the future in the present. But go, my boy! enjoy the good of the present--your best days, lad!--and come back this evening and you shall find your pallet of sweet boughs and soft blankets ready for you," she said.

Rule stooped and kissed her corrugated forehead and then left the hut.

The sun was setting behind the mountain, which threw a dark shadow over Scythia's Ledge and Rule's path, as he ran springing from rock to rock down the precipice to the river's side. It was dark when he reached the spot. But the lights from the windows of Rockhold on the opposite sh.o.r.e gleamed out upon the snow with splendid effect.

Every window in the front of the building was shining with light that streamed out upon the snow; for the shutters had been left unclosed on purpose, this Christmas night.

Rule crossed the ferry and went, as he had been used to go, to the back door, opening on the back porch, where, four years before, Cora used to keep school for her one pupil. He rapped at the door, and Sylvan sprang up and opened it. He was warmly welcomed, and spent a pleasant evening.

The rest of his vacation was spent in a way equally pleasant, and at seven a.m., Monday, Rule was at work, type-setting in the _Watch_ office.

On the third of January following that Christmas there were three departures from Rockhold. Miss Rose Flowers went East to enter upon her new engagement. Corona Haught, in charge of her grandmother and her Uncle Clarence, went West to enter the Young Ladies' Inst.i.tute, in the capital, and Master Sylva.n.u.s Haught went North, in the care of his Uncle Fabian, to enter a boy's school.

CHAPTER IV.

A RETROSPECT.

It was near the close of a cold, bright day early in January, that Mrs.

Rockharrt and Corona Haught, escorted by Mr. Clarence, stepped from the train at the depot of the capital city of their State--which must, for obvious reason, be nameless--and were driven to the Young Ladies'

Inst.i.tute, where the girl was left, and as the adieus were being said it was explained to Cora that discretion and social conventionality dictated that her correspondence with young Rothsay should cease.

Clarence stated that he would write to the youth and explain that the rules of the school, also, forbade such a correspondence.

"I will also tell him that he can continue to send the _Watch_ to you, with his own paragraphs marked as before," said Corona's uncle. "There can be no law against that. I will correspond with Rule occasionally, and keep you posted up as to how he is getting on. There can be no school law against your uncle writing to you."

Cora Haught graduated when she was eighteen. In all these years she had not seen Rule Rothsay. She only heard from him through his letters to her Uncle Clarence, reported second hand to herself. She knew that in these five years Rule had risen, step by step, in the office where he had begun his apprenticeship; that he had risen to be foreman, then sub-editor, and now he was part proprietor and one of the most powerful political writers on the paper.

The workingmen's party wished to put him up as a candidate for the State legislature. What a power he would have been for their cause in that place! but when the subject was proposed to him, he admonished the spokesman that he was, as yet, a little less than of legal age for an office that required its holder to be at least twenty-five years old.

After Cora's graduation the Rockharrt family spent a week in their town house, preparatory to a summer tour through the Northern States and Canada.

One morning, while the whole family were sitting around the breakfast table, old Aaron Rockharrt suddenly spoke:

"Fabian! Now that my granddaughter has left school, she will want a companion near her own age. Miss Rose Flowers would suit very well. Have you any idea where she is?"

"Miss Rose Flowers, my dear sir, is now Mrs. Slydell Stillwater, the--"

"Married!" interrupted all voices except that of the Iron King, who bent his heavy gray brows as he gazed upon his son.

"Stuff and nonsense! How did you know anything about her marriage?"

demanded old Aaron Rockharrt.