"Take care how you mock me!" cried Patty Cannon, with her dark, bold eyes furtive, like one both angered and troubled, and her ruddy cheeks full of cloudy blood.

"Sit down! Give the shillings to pretty Hulda there."

"To her?"

"Ya, ya! to pleasing Hulda; for what will trouble us then, her sinless bosom being their safe depository, and her long-lashed eyes melting our ghosts to gray air?"

With a look of strong dislike, the woman gave Hulda the shillings, saying:

"If you ever show one of 'em to me, gal, I'll make you swaller it."

Hulda took the silver pieces and looked at them a moment with girlish delight:

"Oh, grandma, how kind you are! Why do you speak so mad at me when you give me these pretty things? They seem almost warm in my bosom as I put them there, like things with life. Let me kiss you for them!"

She rose from the chair and approached the mistress of the house, who sat in a strange terror, not forbidding the embrace, yet almost shuddering as Hulda stooped and pressed her pure young lips to the blanched and dissipated face of Patty Cannon.

The Captain looked at the kiss with his peculiar strong, cold look, and smiled at Hulda graciously and said:

"There, ladies, repose in each other's confidence! A few shillings for such a kiss is shameful pay, Aunt Patty. Do you remember as well as I do, Madame Cannon, that once you missed some money, and thought your mother had stolen it, and hunted everywhere for it, and it never came to light?"

"Yes," cried Patty Cannon, "I do," and swore a man's oath.

"Has the Senor been in that direction, do you think? I think he has, for Melson and Milman are up from Twiford's with the news that Zeke's last hide has burst her chain and fled, and all the lower Nanticoke gives no trace of her, and Zeke has passed the heavenly gates."

The Captain drew the back of his silver clasp-knife across his throat, smilingly, and placed on the table a sailor's sheath-knife.

"Zeke only was untied; it was a too generous omission," he said. "The Philadelphia woman the Senor says he set free, and that she has gone to start an alarm against us. The Senor is a cool man: he told me that, and laughed and roared, and says he will live to see us all in a picture-frame. Ayme, ayme, Patty!"

With her face growing longer and longer, the woman heard these scarcely intelligible sentences - wholly unintelligible to the younger people - and to Levin it seemed that she grew suddenly old and yet older, till her cheeks, but lately blooming, seemed dead and wrinkled, and, from maintaining the appearance of hardly fifty, and fair at that, she now looked to be more than sixty years of age, and sad and helpless.

"Van Dorn, I'm dying," she muttered, as her eyes glazed, and she settled down in her chair like a lump of dough.

"Ha! O hala hala! hands off, fair Hulda," the Captain cried, joyfully, as Hulda had been moved to relieve the poor old woman; "no one shall assist at these ceremonies of expiation but Van Dorn himself, whose rights in Mistress Cannon are of priority. She's dropsical, and hastening to perdition too soon, which I must arrest and let her comfort me still more. Sweet comforter! Young gentleman, you shall help me."