He went to the edge of the woods, where he could see her a short distance below, hurrying down the path with a step as light and free as ever.  The wind had met her at the forest’s edge and joined her once more, playing about her skirts and tossing the lily again.  As Arthur watched her, the old music came back into his heart; his eyes sparkled, and all his soul seemed to be dancing in time with her light motion.  Thus it went until she came to a place where the path must hide her from his view.  The young man held his breath, and when she turned a cry of joy escaped him; she saw him and waved her hand to him gaily as she swept on out of his sight.

For a moment afterwards he stood rooted to the spot, then whirled about and laughed aloud.  He put his hand to his forehead, which was flushed and hot, and he gazed about him, as if he were not sure where he was.  “Oh, she is so beautiful!” he cried, his face a picture of rapture.  “So beautiful!”

And he started through the forest as wildly as any madman, now muttering to himself and now laughing aloud and making the forest echo with Helen’s name.  When he stopped again he was far away from the path, in a desolate spot, but tho he was staring around him, he saw no more than before.  Trembling had seized his limbs, and he sank down upon the yellow forest leaves, hiding his face in his hands and whispering, “Oh, if I should lose her!  If I should lose her!” As old Polonius has it, truly it was “the very ecstasy of love.”

CHAPTER II

“A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay.”

The town of Oakdale is at the present time a flourishing place, inhabited principally by “suburbanites,” for it lies not very far from New York; but the Reverend Austin Davis, who was the spiritual guardian of most of them, had come to Oakdale some twenty and more years ago, when it was only a little village, with a struggling church which it was the task of the young clergyman to keep alive.  Perhaps the growth of the town had as much to do with his success as his own efforts; but however that might have been he had received his temporal reward some ten years later, in the shape of a fine stone church, with a little parsonage beside it.  He had lived there ever since, alone with his one child,—­for just after coming to Oakdale he had married a daughter of one of the wealthy families of the neighborhood, and been left a widower a year or two later.

A more unromantic and thoroughly busy man than Mr. Davis at the age of forty-five, when this story begins, it would not have been easy to find; but nevertheless people spoke of no less than two romances that had been connected with his life.  One of them had been his early marriage, which had created a mild sensation, while the other had come into his life even sooner, in fact on the very first day of his arrival at Oakdale.