Take the path that
leads through the garden."
I read it with a catch of the breath, with a certainty that the happiness
of many people depended upon what I should say at that meeting. And to
think of this and to compose myself a little, I made my way to the garden
in search of the path, that I might know it when the time came. Entering
a gap in the hedge, I caught sight of the shaded seat under the tree
which had been the scene of our first meeting with Antoinette, and I
hurried past it as I crossed the garden. There were two openings in the
opposite hedge, the one through which Nick and I had come, and another.
I took the second, and with little difficulty found the path of which the
note had spoken. It led through a dense, semi-tropical forest in the
direction of the swamp beyond, the way being well beaten, but here and
there jealously crowded by an undergrowth of brambles and the prickly
Spanish bayonet. I know not how far I had walked, my head bent in
thought, before I felt the ground teetering under my feet, and there was
the bayou. It was a narrow lane of murky, impenetrable water, shaded now
by the forest wall. Imaged on its amber surface were the twisted boughs
of the cypresses of the swamp beyond,--boughs funereally draped, as
though to proclaim a warning of unknown perils in the dark places.
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