"You ask me to marry you?"

"Conservatively; that is, continue to be my pupil, and obey me. I will bring your mind out of its ignorance, your body out of rags, your associations out of crime. I will provide for you, as you are obedient, while I live and after I am dead. You shall travel with me, and see bright cities - New Orleans, Charleston, Havana. If you remain here, you will be another Patty Cannon or go to jail. There! Look at it conservatively: warmth, riches, pleasure, attention, change, dress to become you, a watch and jewels, against villainy and lowness of every kind."

"How are you to be repaid for this?"

"By your love."

"But it is not mine to give; Levin has it."

"Pooh! that's beneath you."

"But it is gone; I cannot get it back; it will not come."

"Give me yourself," McLane said, drawing her towards him; "the refinements I do not care about. Be mine!"

The girl allowed herself to be brought nearly to his side, and, as he bent to kiss her with his large, complacent lips, she glided from his hands.

"I could never stoop," said Hulda, "to be even the wife of a negro dealer."

He colored to the eyes, yet with admiration of her almost aristocratic composure.

"You could not stoop to me?" he said "Not from your father's gallows?"

"No; he was a robber, but a bold one. You only receive the goods."

She was gone; and he stood, with evil lights in his face, but no shame. He drank some brandy from a flask, and murmured, "Now I have an insult to revenge, as well as a fancy to be gratified; her father must have been a cool rogue. Well, everything has to be done by force here; Patty Cannon shall see my gold."

CHAPTER XLI.

AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK.

Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret, a room Van Dorn usually slept in. With her emotions profoundly excited, though she had not revealed them - her modesty having received a stab that now brought bitter tears to her eyes, and blushes, unseen except by the angels, whose white wings had hidden them from her tempter - Vesta fled into this room to deliberate upon her dire extremity.

Three persons only were now in the house, each one an interested party in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something inconsequential and merry and heartless.

"Perhaps I can fly to our old house across the State Line, and take refuge with the new tenant there," Hulda thought. "Oh! I wish Van Dorn was here; he is so brave; and when he left me his kiss was like my father's."

Chains clanked, and the drone of low hymns came down the hatchway from the slave-pen.