"Fingall! Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!"

A grey mist was rising from the river, the sun was drinking it
delightedly, the swift blue water showed underneath it, and the top of
Whitefaced Mountain peaked the mist by a hand-length. The river brushed
the banks like rustling silk, and the only other sound, very sharp and
clear in the liquid monotone, was the crack of a woodpecker's beak on a
hickory tree.

It was a sweet, fresh autumn morning in Lonesome Valley. Before night the
deer would bellow reply to the hunters' rifles, and the mountain-goat
call to its unknown gods; but now there was only the wild duck skimming
the river, and the high hilltop rising and fading into the mist, the
ardent sun, and again that strange cry--

"Fingall!--Oh, Fingall! Fingall!"

Two men, lounging at a fire on a ledge of the hills, raised their eyes to
the mountain-side beyond and above them, and one said presently:

"The second time. It's a woman's voice, Pierre." Pierre nodded, and
abstractedly stirred the coals about with a twig.

"Well, it is a pity--the poor Cynthie," he said at last.

"It is a woman, then. You know her, Pierre--her story?"

"Fingall! Fingall!--Oh, Fingall!"