And then, when he and his companions wanted venison, it was strange to go forth into the forest in the dark, two of them bearing a great iron pot slung upon a long rod, and heaped with blazing pine-cones.  Then several pairs of these luminous spots would be seen coming together, and perhaps a dangerous couple would glare down from a tree, and a wounded panther would come crashing into their midst.

After that, he went and spent Christmas in Florida.  He had had frequent letters from home and from his step-father.  He wished to keep away till a certain thing was settled one way or the other, but every letter showed that it was still unsettled; the sea-nymph that he had been wasting his heart upon had not yet decided to accept his brother’s, but there was every likelihood that she would.

As time went on, however, he felt happy in the consciousness that absence was doing its work upon him, and that change had refreshed his mind.  He was beginning to forget her.  When the woman whom one loves is to marry one’s brother, and that brother happens to be of all the family the one whom one prefers, what quality can be so admirable as inconstancy?

Still, for a man who was really forgetting, he argued the matter too much in his mind.  Even when he got far south, among the Florida keys, and saw the legions of the heron and the ibis stalking with stately gait along the wet sand, and every now and then thrusting in their “javelin bills,” spiking and bringing out long wriggling flashes of silver that went alive down their throats, he would still be thinking it over.  Yes; he was forgetting her.  He began to be in better spirits.  He was in very good spirits one day in January when, quite unknown to him, the snow was shovelled away from the corner of a quiet churchyard in which his mother slept, and room was made beside her for the old man who had loved him as his own.

Old Daniel Mortimer had no such following as had attended the funeral of his mother, and no such peaceful sunshine sleeping on a landscape all blossom and growth.  The wind raged, and the snow whirled all about his grave and in it.  The coffin was white before the first clod of earth was thrown on it, and the mourners were driven out of the churchyard, when the solemn service was over, by such gusts of storm and whirling wind as they could hardly stand against.

His will was read.  He had hardly anything to leave.  His directions were very simple and few, and there was a little desk locked up in a cabinet that nobody thought about, and that the one person who could have opened it supposed to concern exclusively himself.  So when he came, six months after, and looked about him with regretful affection; when he had put the old man’s portrait up in a place of honour, and looked to the paying of all the debts, for everything, even to the furniture, was now his own; when he had read the will, and sealed up all such papers as he thought his half-brother Valentine might afterwards want to refer to—­he betook himself to his own particular domain, his long room in the top of the house.  There, locking himself in, he opened his cabinet, and taking out the little desk, sat down to look for and read this letter.