"But I am a slave," Virgie sobbed. "Oh, my Lord! to think I am not Miss Vesta's, but a strange man's, slave. How could she give me away!"

"It was an error of judgment," Tilghman replied. "She could not anticipate her mother's immediate death. Yet there, where she thought you safest, you were most in peril."

They had now crossed the Dividing creek into Worcester County, and halted to cool the horses off at the same old spring, under the gum-tree, where Meshach Milburn stopped, the evening he went to the Furnace village.

"William," Rhoda Holland spoke, "if Virgie is McLane's slave you can't keep him from a-takin' her. She can't go back to Prencess Anne at all."

"I don't mean that she shall, Rhoda. I know you are a brave woman, and we will drive her to-night to Snow Hill, and leave her there with a nurse, a free woman, once belonging to my family, and this nurse has a husband who is said to be a conductor on what is called the Underground Road to the free states."

"Lord sakes! a Abolitionist?"

"I hope so," Tilghman said. "I know Vesta wants to set this girl free, and there is no way to do it, and respect her womanhood, but by giving her a wild beast's chance to run."

"My, my! And you a minister of the Gospil, William!"

"Yes, of the Gospel that tells me how to be a neighbor to my neighbor." The young man's eyes flashed. "I never felt so humiliated for my cloth and for my country as now. To think how many men preach the Gospel of God all their lives long, and have never set a living soul free. I will do one such Christian felony, by the help of Christ."

As he spoke, the sound of a corn-stalk fiddle, and of foresters' naked feet dancing on the floor of the old Milburn cabin, came crooning out in the night.

In another hour they were at the Furnace village, its blast gone out, its lines of huts deserted, no human soul to be seen; and the mill-pond, lying like a parchment under the funereal cypress-trees, seemed stained with the blood of the bog-ores that oozed upward from the depths like the corpse of murdered Enterprise, suffocated in Meshach Milburn's foreclosure.

A sense of desolation filled them all; but what was it, in either of the white twain, to the bursting ties of that lovely quadroon, raised like a lily in the household heat of kindness and the breath of purity, to be cast forth like a witch, on a moment's information, and consigned to the ponds and night-damps?

The horses toiled through the sand till an open country of farms gave better roads, and at ten o'clock at night they crossed the Pocomoke at Snow Hill, and stopped at a gate before a neat, whitewashed, one-story house, with a large stack-chimney over the centre, and two doors and a single window in the front. It stood in a short street leading to the river, whose splutter-docks and reeds were seen near by among the masts of vessels and the mounds of sawdust.

Virgie kissed Rhoda good-night, and descended with Mr. Tilghman, who opened a gate, and, going up some steps, knocked at a vine-environed door. A window opened and there was a parley, and the door soon afterwards unclosed softly and admitted them.