"Rhoda, my dear, there is a bonnet up-stairs I expect to wear this winter, and I want to try it on you, whom I think it will particularly become."

Rhoda's quiet eyes flashed as she saw the new article and heard Vesta praise it, upon her head. The old bonnet had received a cruel blow, in spite of Mrs. Somers.

Tilghman, too, accused himself that he felt a little relieved when he escorted Rhoda back to Meshach's in another bonnet, and Vesta followed, with her great shaggy dog, Turk; she not unconscious - though serene and thoughtfully polite to all she knew - of people peering at her in wonder and excitement from every door and window of the town. The news was working in every household, from the servants in the kitchens to the aged people helped to their food with bib and spoon, that the famed daughter of Daniel Custis was the prize of the junk dealer and usurer in "old town" by the bridge, who had enslaved a wife at last.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE DUSKY LEVELS.

The new son-in-law, left alone with Judge Custis, asked to be propped up in bed, and nothing was visible that would support his pillow but the aged leather hat-box that Custis, with a wry face, brought to do duty.

"My illness is unfortunate," he gasped; "not only to me, but to the new ties I have formed; to the mutual interest my wife and I have in making up your losses on Nassawongo furnace, which we are all the poorer by to that amount; and to a suitor whose cause I have taken up. I have bought an interest in a great lawsuit."

"Then the day of reckoning of your enemies has come, Milburn."

"Not yet," said the sick man, with a proud flash of his eyes, "unless I am no merchant and you are no lawyer, and the first I will not concede."

"Nor I the second," exclaimed the Judge, with some pride and temper.

"You were once a good lawyer, if visionary," resumed the money-lender, with scant ceremony. "Had we been able to respect each other we might have been confederated in things valuable to ourselves and to our time and place. But that is past, and you do not possess my confidence as my legal agent, my attorney. I wish you to get another advocate for me."

"I am willing to be useful, even without your compliments," the Judge said, remembering his Christian resolution. "We will not quarrel, if I can serve you."

"I do not wish to hurt your feelings, but my strength is not great enough for unmeaning flattery. This marriage was so dear to my heart that I have put it before a very large interest about which I have no time to lose, and still am helpless upon this bed. I will trust you to do my errand. Go to that chest, Judge Custis, and you will find a package of papers in the cedar till at the end. Bring them here."

As the Judge opened the old chest a musty smell, as of mummies wrapped in herbs, ascended into his nose, and he saw some faded clothes, as those of poor people deceased, male and female, lying within. The mocking-bird piped a noisy warning as he raised the lid of the till and saw the desired papers among a parcel of spotted and striped bird-eggs: