The Wildfire Club - The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive

OB THB LAST BIfAn. 91
him; he knows not what he does." In another moment
her tall figure was lost in the blackness of night and the
waving pines of the forest.
William Rookwood staggered back into the house; the
crazy door swung to and fro, then closed with a loud and
startling crash, while' the moaning wind swept like a
requiem around the ivied tower, and stirred the old green
moss-covered bell, which, for the first time in many years,
boomed in hoarse and mournful cadence to the wild wind'.
shriek.
CHAPTEB VI.
WILD and bitter blew the cold winter blast, sweeping
around the lonely wood through which Hannah Morrison
took her way on the night of her eJr.pulsion from Rookwood
Grange. For twenty years she had tra"l"ersed the
same path, which in one single hour had become suddenly
strange to her. She had flitted through the mazes of the
forest paths, when they had covered the ground for many
miles with the tiny patter of infancy and the elastic step
of youth; she had seen the giant oak levelled, and ita
mysterious arches broken, to make way for the habitations
of man; and she had watched the growth of village
after village among the green savannas, where she had so
delighted to bury herilelf in her strange, lonely childhood;
yet now the footway, so familiar by the intercourse of a
long life, had changed. The stunned spirit was stronger
than the associations of many years; and she had to stop
and recall with a determined effort her feeble memory ere
she could assure herself that she was travelling the old
familiar road on that bleak December night. Hannah
Morrison was in fact the living spirit of the old Grange ;
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