from Demorest, and with a glance at the clock that marked the expiring
limit of the Puritan Sabbath, the landlord at last consented. By the
time the falling snow had muffled the street from the indiscreet clamor
of Sabbath-breaking hoofs, the landlord's noiseless sledge was at the
door and Demorest had departed.

The snow fell all that night; with fierce gusts of wind that moaned in
the chimneys of North Liberty and sorely troubled the Sabbath sleep of
its decorous citizens; with deep, passionless silences, none the
less fateful, that softly precipitated a spotless mantle of merciful
obliteration equally over their precise or their straying footprints,
that would have done them good to heed and to remember; and when morning
broke upon a world of week-day labor, it was covered as far as their
eyes could reach as with a clear and unwritten tablet, on which they
might record their lives anew. Near the wreck of the broken bridge on
the Warensboro turnpike an overturned buggy lay imbedded in the drift
and debris of the river hurrying silently towards the sea, and a horse
with fragments of broken and icy harness still clinging to him was found
standing before the stable-door of Edward Blandford. But to any further
knowledge of the fate of its owner, North Liberty awoke never again.


PART II



CHAPTER I


The last note of the Angelus had just rung out of the crumbling fissures