"Papa!"

"My child?"

"Let me speak with you."

Judge Custis rose, and raised his hands to Aunt Hominy in speechless recognition of her service; but not till the door closed behind him did the old cook's cry burst through her quivering lips:

"Oh! chillen, chillen, he'll never eat no mo' like dat again. Ole Meshach's measured him in!"

CHAPTER XI.

DYING PRIDE.

At the termination of Milburn's long visit, Vesta had gone to her own room, and read her passage in the Bible, and said her prayer, and tried to think, but the day's application had been too great to leave her mind its morning energy, when health, which is so much of decision, was elastic in her veins and brain.

She began to see her duty loom up like a prodigious thing on one side, crowding every other consideration out of the way but one - her modesty; and threatening that, which, like a little mouse, ran around and around her mind, timorous, but helpless, and without a hole of escape.

She would cease to be a maid within the circuit of the clock, or forsake her family, and drive that great bloodhound of duty over the threshold of her ruined home.

In the one case lay outward devastation - the red eyes of parents and servants who had not slept all night, and looked at her as their obdurate hostage, and the prying constables lodged upon the premises to see that nothing was smuggled out, the ring of the auctioneer's bell, and the fingering of boors and old gossips over the cherished things of the family, even to her heirlooms, jewelry, and hosiery; the vast old house a hollow barn when these were done, and she and her mother visitors at the jail where her poor father looked through the bars, and bent his head in shame!

Then the servants, one after another, mounted upon the court-house block, the old gray servitors mocked, the little children parted, like calves by the butcher, and the young girls feeling the desperate apprehensions of abuse and violation, that were the other alternative to herself, with whom purity was like the whiteness of the lily, prized more than its beauty of form or its perfume.

She glanced in her mirror by the light that flamed in her brazen grate, and saw the blushes climb like flying virgins at the sack of towns, up the white ramparts of her neck and temples.

The form which had altered so little from childhood, supple and straight, and moulded to perfection, was to fall like the young hickory-tree in the August hurricane, twisted from its native grove. The breath of the man she was to yield her life to, irresistible and hot as that storm, she had felt already, when he held her for a moment in his arms in the transport of passion, and heard his fearless avowal of desire.

To marry any man now seemed hard; to marry this one was inexpressible shame, and at the thought of it she could not shed a tear, such paralysis came over her. She had read of the recent Greek revolution, where elegant ladies of Scio, and other isles of the AEgean Sea, educated in the best seminaries of Europe, had been sold by thousands as common slaves in the markets of Constantinople, and carried to their estates by brutal Turks, with all the gloating anticipation of lust and tyranny.