A Daughter of Maryland — page 85: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

68 A DAUGHTER OF MARYLAND. ‘*Ha, Miss Aurian! I read your secret now. You are on a visit to the old Granary. So Uncle Frost’s story was not without its effect upon you. I have wanted to go there myself, but I have not had the courage—I did not mean that. But I have not had the desire to do so yet. I may have. Mother, the wrong done you shall yet be righted; I swear it.’’ Musing thus he rode slowly upon the old moss-grown bridge connecting the two banks of the stream, and he fell to watching the running water, until mile after mile had sped past him without a trace of weariness or of sadness, singing the same old song over and over again, the rapids joining regularly in the chorus. Soon he grew tired of this, or he was not in a mood then to listen always and never to reply. He had too much upon his mind to say himself. From the stream, with its endless song, he fell to scanning the distant landscape, and then he found a more satisfying occupation in noting the slow-sinking of the westering sun, more satisfying because it marked the passage of that time which must bring him the object of his waiting. Soon the orb of day reached the corrugated brow of the horizon, where it became impaled for awhile on one of the jagged mountain splinters pinning the sky to the earth. Sunsets have a peculiar fascination for those of _his dreamy, poetical temperament, and he was wont to read in them secrets he would not have dared to whisper to another. ‘The little arrows of light shooting out from the central orb deepen into the blue too rapidly to warrant a pleasant day for the morrow,’’ he said half -aloud. ‘‘I don’t like——’’ ‘*Halloo, mister!’’ broke in a sharp voice upon his musings, causing him to turn skarply about, when he beheld to his amazement half a dozen horsemen who had approached along the sandy road without “attracting his attention. ‘‘Have you seen a man pass this way—halloo, is that you, Berners?’’ comicboolk