to take leave of him, which he did, in the words of his favorite--

"Fare thee well!
The elements be kind to thee, and make
Thy spirits all of comfort."




CHAPTER III.

Ici il fallut que j'en divinasse plus qu'on ne m'en disoit.
MEMOIRES DE SULLY.


A week after the events narrated in the preceding chapters, a small
company was collected in a parlor of one of the houses of Hillsdale.
It consisted of a gentleman, of some fifty years of age; his wife, a
fine-looking matron, some years his junior; their daughter, a bright
blue-eyed flaxen-haired girl, rounding into the most graceful form of
womanhood, and a young man, who is not entirely a stranger to us.

The judgment of the doctor, respecting the wound of Pownal--for it is
he--had proved to be correct, and, on the second day after the hurt,
he had returned to the village, with his friend William Bernard, in
the house of whose father he was, for the present, domiciliated. The
young men had been acquainted before, and the accident seemed to have
established a sort of intimacy between them. It was, therefore, with
no feeling of reluctance, that Pownal accepted an invitation to desert
his boarding-house for a while, for the hospitality of his friend.