The Mountain Girl by Emma Payne Erskine Chapter 4 Page 7

He was a youth again, hungry and sad, stumbling along the untrodden way, avoiding the beaten path, yet unerringly taking his course toward the cleft rock at the head of the fall behind the great holly tree. It was not the food Cassandra had promised him that he wanted now, but to look into the eyes of one who would pity and love him. Heartsick and weary as he never had been in all his young life, lonely beyond bearing, he hurried along.

As he forced a path through the undergrowth, he heard the sound of a mountain stream, and, seeking it, he followed along its rocky bed, leaping from one huge block of stone to another, and swinging himself across by great overhanging sycamore boughs, drawing, by its many windings, nearer and nearer to the spot where it precipitated itself over the mountain wall. Ever the noise of the water