Lachlan to a race and they galloped ahead of the party. Drawing rein, she talked with Lachlan, as they moved slowly on, about the task that lay ahead of them, asking him many questions, drawing from him in rough outline his and Almayne's plans for the rescue of Barradell.
There was another question that she planned to ask him but it was one that had to be led up to with some care; and gradually, as they rode on a hundred yards ahead of the pack train, the spell of the wilderness took hold upon her. Gradually she forgot her own concerns and a certain vague doubt which, since her conversation with Almayne, had shaped itself in her mind. Slowly her anxieties faded, and in their place came a languid dream-like content which deepened as the afternoon wore on. The feeling came to her that all sorrow and evil had been left behind—that she was riding through the Garden of God towards happiness and her lost lover and the fulfilment of her dreams.
Truly, it was like God's Garden, that springtime wilderness of Carolina where the white man's axe was yet unknown. It was a garden abloom not only with flowers but with birds more beautiful than golden jessamine or pink Indian rose; a garden not still and silent as most gardens are but astir with abundant life, aquiver with innumerable voices.
There were places where all was silent. Sometimes the trail led through lofty pine woods, carpeted with fern, where the giant trees towered eighty feet without
