CHAPTER VII.

Wandering Fanny.

It was a jocund morning in early summer—­some five years after the events related in the last chapter.

Old Field Cottage was a perfect gem of rural beauty.  The Old Fields themselves no longer deserved the name—­the repose of years had restored them to fertility, and now they were blooming in pristine youth—­far as the eye could reach between the cottage and the forest, and the cottage and the sea-beach, the fields were covered with a fine growth of sweet clover, whose verdure was most refreshing to the sight.  The young trees planted by Marian, had grown up, forming a pleasant grove around the house.  The sweet honeysuckle and fragrant white jasmine, and the rich, aromatic, climbing rose, had run all over the walls and windows of the house, embowering it in verdure, bloom and perfume.

While Marian stood enjoying for a few moments the morning hour, she was startled by the sound of rapid footsteps, and then by the sight of a young woman in wild attire, issuing from the grove at the right of the cottage, and flying like a hunted hare toward the house.

Marian impulsively opened the gate, and the creature fled in, frantically clapped to the gate, and stood leaning with her back against it, and panting with haste and terror.

She was a young and pretty woman—­pretty, notwithstanding the wildness of her staring black eyes and the disorder of her long black hair that hung in tangled tresses to her waist.  Her head and feet were bare, and her white gown was spotted with green stains of the grass, and torn by briars, as were also her bleeding feet and arms.  Marian felt for her the deepest compassion; a mere glance had assured her that the poor, panting, pretty creature was insane.  Marian took her hand and gently pressing it, said: 

“You look very tired and faint—­come in and rest yourself and take breakfast with us.”

The stranger drew away her hand and looked at Marian from head to foot.  But in the midst of her scrutiny, she suddenly sprang, glanced around, and trembling violently, grasped the gate for support.  It was but the tramping of a colt through the clover that had startled her.

“Do not be frightened; there is nothing that can hurt you; you are safe here.”

“And won’t he come?”

“Who, poor girl?”

“The Destroyer!”

“No, poor one, no destroyer comes near us here; see how quiet and peaceable everything is here!”

The wanderer slowly shook her head with a cunning, bitter smile, that looked stranger on her fair face than the madness itself had looked, and: 

“So it was there,” she said, “but the Destroyer was at hand, and the thunder of terror and destruction burst upon our quiet—­but I forgot—­the fair spirit said I was not to think of that—­such thoughts would invoke the fiend again,” added the poor creature, smoothing her forehead with both hands, and then flinging them wide, as if to dispel and cast away some painful concentration there.