"Is that dreadful woman dead?" sighed the Chancellor.

"Yes; she will never plague Delaware again, marster."

"God be thanked!" the old man groaned. "Justice and murder are kin no more."

They said he died that instant of heart disease.

CHAPTER XLV.

THE JUDGE REMARRIED.

Vesta found her circle reunited, though with many absentees, at Princess Anne.

Aunt Hominy took her place in the kitchen, and cooked with all her former art, but her voice and understanding were gone, and she never would go past the Entailed Hat, and still regarded it, as nearly as could be made out, as the cause of all her errors and dangers, though she seemed to admit its unevadable dominion.

The poor woman, Mary, finding Samson Hat, in time, wishing to have a partner in the old storehouse, where he had become the only resident, had faith enough left to make her third marriage with him; and his means not only made good the property she had lost, but the hale old man presented her with a babe boy, which took the name of Meshach Phoebus, and on which Judge Custis sagely remarked that it "ought to have been a red-headed nigger, having both the fiery furnace and the blazing sun in its name."

On Samson Hat's death, which resulted from rheumatism reaching his heart, his widow joined her deliverer from slavery, James Phoebus, in the West, where he lived happily with his bride and stepson, and often wrote home of a friend he had there named Abe Lincoln, who made flat-boat voyages with him down the Mississippi. Both Ellenora Phoebus and Hulda Dennis reared Western families which played effective parts in the drama of civilization.

Vesta lost no time in setting free every slave about Teackle Hall and on the farms, with the approval of her father and husband also, and Roxy became the wife of Whatcoat, the rescued freedman, and the replacer, at her mistress's side, of poor Virgie, whose body was brought home and interred by the church where she had been her white sister's bridesmaid. The grief of Vesta for Virgie was quiet, but long, and as that of an equal, not a mistress, though she may have never known how equal.

In the fatalities thronging about her marriage Vesta observed one signal blessing - the complete reform of her father's habits.

He drank nothing whatever, supplying with fruit the pleasures of wine, and with exercise and business, on her husband's behests, the vagrant tours he once made in the forest for politics and amours.