Christie did not reply; more than once before she had felt that
inexplicable misgiving. It had sometimes seemed to her that she had
never been quite herself since that memorable night when she had
slipped out of their sleeping-cabin, and stood alone in the gracious and
commanding presence of the woods and hills. In the solitude of night,
with the hum of the great city rising below her--at times even in
theatres or crowded assemblies of men and women--she forgot herself,
and again stood in the weird brilliancy of that moonlight night in
mute worship at the foot of that slowly-rising mystic altar of piled
terraces, hanging forests, and lifted plateaus that climbed forever to
the lonely skies. Again she felt before her the expanding and opening
arms of the protecting woods. Had they really closed upon her in some
pantheistic embrace that made her a part of them? Had she been baptized
in that moonlight as a child of the great forest? It was easy to believe
in the myths of the poets of an idyllic life under those trees, where,
free from conventional restrictions, one loved and was loved. If she,
with her own worldly experience, could think of this now, why might
not George Kearney have thought? . . . She stopped, and found herself
blushing even in the darkness. As the thought and blush were the usual
sequel of her reflections, it is to be feared that they may have been at
times the impelling cause.
Mr. Carr, however, made up for his daughters' want of sympathy with
metropolitan life. To their astonishment, he not only plunged into the
fashionable gayeties and amusements of the town, but in dress and manner
assumed the role of a leader of society. The invariable answer to their
half-humorous comment was the necessities of the mine, and the policy
of frequenting the company of capitalists, to enlist their support and
confidence. There was something in this so unlike their father, that
what at any other time they would have hailed as a relief to
his habitual abstraction now half alarmed them. Yet he was not
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