FEEBLE indeed she was, but the stung mind lent its vigour to the sickly frame as she followed the path which Blair had taken up the steep and shaggy precipice before her. She never relaxed her speed, except now and then for a moment, and then she resumed her way with additional impetuosity. The strong wiry fibres of the untrodden heath tore her ankles until the blood burst through her stockings— but she never heeded the smart.

At length she gained the brow of the hill, and cast her eyes round her to consider in which direction he had most probably taken his course. Her eyes wandered wide over a sea of mountains, divided everywhere by deep and rocky glens, down which, in every direction, the Alpine streams were flowing—but nowhere, though she strained her vision to the utmost, could she descry any human dwelling, far less any human form. “I shall never see him,” said she to herself, “I shall never see him more—he is lost to me for ever—I shall never find him among this labyrinth of mountains.” And so saying, she plunged more rapidly than ever down the shelving bank, and ran on in that sort of blind agony until her course was arrested by a brook, which had been swollen into a torrent by the storm of the preceding night.

She followed its course, having no power to cross its waters; nor, if she had been able to do so, any predilection for one path more than for another. It soon conducted her into a black pass, through which the tumbling waters forced themselves, leaving barely room for any human foot to partake the passage they had opened for themselves in the winters of ages. Just there, however, Charlotte descried the mark of a man's foot as if recently stamped on the wet sand, and she knew it was Blair’s, and went on, with new strung nerves, although it was sometimes necessary for her to leap from one wet stone to another, on footing as uncertain as might have arrested a hunter in the full career of the chase.