Suddenly, God knows, I started, I started.

I imagined—­I dreamed—­that I saw a pressure in a bed of moss and violets, recently made! And while I stood gloating upon that impossible thing, I imagined—­I dreamed—­the lunacy of it!—­that I heard a laugh...! the laugh, my good God, of a human soul.

Or it seemed half a laugh, and half a sob:  and it passed from me in one fleeting instant.

Laughs, and sobs, and idiot hallucinations, I had often heard before, feet walking, sounds behind me:  and even as I had heard them, I had known that they were nothing.  But brief as was this impression, it was yet so thrillingly real, that my poor heart received, as it were, the very shock of death, and I fell backward into a mass of moss, supported on the right palm, while the left pressed my working bosom; and there, toiling to catch my breath, I lay still, all my soul focussed into my ears.  But now I could hear no sound, save only the vast and audible hum of the silence of the universe.

There was, however, the foot-print.  If my eye and ear should so conspire against me, that, I thought, was hard.

Still I lay, still, in that same pose, without a stir, sick and dry-mouthed, infirm and languishing, with dying breaths:  but keen, keen—­and malign.

I would wait, I said to myself, I would be artful as snakes, though so woefully sick and invalid:  I would make no sound....

After some minutes I became conscious that my eyes were leering—­leering in one fixed direction:  and instantly, the mere fact that I had a sense of direction proved to me that I must, in truth, have heard something!  I strove—­I managed—­to raise myself:  and as I stood upright, feebly swaying there, not the terrors of death alone were in my breast, but the authority of the monarch was on my brow.

I moved:  I found the strength.

Slow step by slow step, with daintiest noiselessness, I moved to a thread of moss that from the glade passed into the thicket, and along its winding way I stepped, in the direction of the sound.  Now my ears caught the purling noise of a brooklet, and following the moss-path, I was led into a mass of bush only two or three feet higher than my head.  Through this, prowling like a stealthy cat, I wheedled my painful way, emerged upon a strip of open long-grass, and now was faced, three yards before me, by a wall of acacia-trees, prickly-pear and pichulas, between which and a forest beyond I spied a gleam of running water.

On hands and knees I crept toward the acacia-thicket, entered it a little, and leaning far forward, peered.  And there—­at once—­ten yards to my right—­I saw.

Singular to say, my agitation, instead of intensifying to the point of apoplexy and death, now, at the actual sight, subsided to something very like calmness.  With malign and sullen eye askance I stood, and steadily I watched her there.

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