"Yes."
"Do not talk at all.  By-and-by we will talk.  Now I am going to ask you
a selfish question, and you are just to bend your head for 'yes' or
'no.'  Will the smell of tobacco distress you, or bring the faintness
back?  These autumn flies sting abominably here, under the trees."

She moved her head slowly.  "I do not feel them," she said after a
while.

He glanced at her compassionately before nodding to Manasseh for a
light.  "No, poor wretch, I'll be sworn you do not," he muttered between
the puffs.  "Thank you, Manasseh; and now will you step down to the Inn,
order the horses back to stable, and bring George and Harry back with
you?  I may require them to break a head or two here, if there should be
trouble.  Tell Alexander"--this was the coachman--"to have an eye on
Master Dicky, and see that he gets his dinner.  The child is on no
account to come here, or be told about this.  His papa is detained on
business--you understand?  Yes, and by the way, you may extract a book
from the valise--the Calderon, for choice, or if it come handier, that
second volume of Corneille.  Don't waste time, though, in searching for
this or that.  In the stocks I've no doubt a book is a book: the
instrument has a reputation for levelling."

Manasseh departed on his errand, and for a while the Collector paid no
heed to his companion.  He and she were now unprotected, at the mercy of
the mob if it intended mischief; and the next few minutes would be
critical.

He sat immersed apparently in his own thoughts, and by the look on his
face these were serious thoughts.  He seemed to see and yet not to see
the ring of faces; to be aware of them, yet not concerned with them, no
whit afraid and quite as little defiant.  True, he was smoking, but
without a trace of affected insouciance or bravado; gravely rather,
resting an elbow on his groin and leaning forward with a preoccupied
frown.  Two minutes passed in this silence, and he felt the danger
ebbing.  Mob insolence ever wants a lead, and--perhaps because with the
return of fine weather the fishing-crews had put to sea early--this Port
Nassau crowd lacked a fugleman.


"Are you here--because--of me?"

"Hush, again," he answered quietly, not turning his head.  "I like you
to talk if you feel strong enough; but for the moment it will be better
if they do not perceive. . . . Yes, and no," he answered her question
after a pause.  "I am here to see that you get through this.  You are in
pain?"

"Yes; but it is easier."

"You are afraid of these people?"

"Afraid?"  She took some time considering this.  "No," she said at
length.  "I am not afraid of them.  I do not see them.  You are here."

He took the tobacco-leaf from his lips, blew a thin cloud of smoke with
grave deliberateness, and in doing so contrived to glance at her face.

"You have blood in you.  That face, too, my beauty," he muttered,
"never came to you but by gift of blood."  Aloud he said, "That's brave.
But take care when your senses clear and the strain comes back on you.
Speak to me when you feel it coming; I don't want it to tauten you up
with a jerk.  You understand?"

"Yes. . . ."

"I wonder now--" he began musingly, and broke off.  The danger he had
been keeping account with was over; Manasseh had returned with the two
grooms, and they--perfectly trained servants on the English model--took
their posts without exhibiting surprise by so much as a twitch of the
face.  George in particular was a tight fellow with his fists, as the
crowd, should it offer annoyance, would assuredly learn.  The Collector
took the volume which Manasseh brought him, and opened it, but did not
begin to read.  "You despise these people?" he asked.

He was puzzled with himself.  He was here to protect her; and this, from
him to her, implied a noble condescension.  His fine manners, to be
sure, forbade his showing it; on no account would he have shown it.
But the puzzle was, he could not feel it.

She met his eyes.  "No . . . why should I despise them?"

"They are _canaille_."

"What does that mean? . . . They have been cruel to me.  Afterwards, I
expect, they will be crueller still.  But just now it does not matter,
because you are here."

"Does that make so much difference?" he asked thoughtlessly.

She caught her breath upon a sob.  "Ah, do not--"  The voice died,
strangled, in her throat.  "Do not--"  Again she could get no further,
but sat shivering, her fingers interlocked and writhing.

"Brute!" muttered the Collector to himself.  He did not ask her pardon,
but opened his Calderon, signed to Manasseh to roll a fresh
tobacco-leaf, and fell to reading his favourite _Alcalde de Zalamea_.


The sun crept slowly to the right over the tops of the maples.  It no
longer scorched their faces, but slanted in rays through the upper
boughs, dappling the open walks with splashes of light which, as they
receded in distance, took by a trick of the eyesight a pattern regular
as diaper.  By this time the Collector, when he glanced up from his
book, had an ample view of the square, for the crowd had thinned.
The punishment of the stocks was no such rare spectacle in Port Nassau;
and five hours is a tedious while even for the onlooker--a very long
while indeed to stand weighing the fun of throwing a handful of filth
against the cost of a thrashing.  The men-folk, reasoning thus, had
melted away to their longshore avocations.  The women, always more
patient--as to their nature the show was more piquant than to the
men's--had withdrawn with their knitting to benches well within
eyeshot.  The children, playing around, grew more and more immersed in
their games; which, nevertheless, one or another would interrupt from
time to time to point and ask a question.  Above the Court-house the
town clock chimed its quarters across the afternoon heat.

The Collector, glancing up in the act of turning a page, spied Mr. Trask
hobbling down an alley towards the Jail.  Mr. Trask, a martyr to gout,
helped his progress with an oaken staff. He leaned on this as he halted
before the stocks.

"Tired?" he asked.

"Damnably!" answered the Collector with great cheerfulness.  "It takes
one in the back, you see.  If ever the Town Fathers think of moving this
machine, you might put in a word for shifting it a foot or two back,
against the prison wall."

Mr. Trask grinned.

"I suppose now," he said after a pause, "you think you are doing a fine
thing, and doing it handsomely?"

"I had some notion of the sort, but this confinement of the feet is
wonderfully cooling to the brain.  No--if you dispute it.  Most human
actions are mixed."

Mr. Trask eyed him, chin between two fingers and thumb.  When he spoke
again it was with lowered voice.  "Is it altogether kind to the girl?"
he asked.

"Eh?"  The Collector in turn eyed Mr. Trask.

"Or even quite fair to her?"

"Oh, come!" said the Collector.  "Tongues?  I hadn't thought of that."

"I dare say not." Mr. Trask glanced up at the windows of a two-storeyed
house on the left, scarcely a stone's throw away, a respectable mansion
with a verandah and neat gateway of wrought iron.  "But at the end of
this what becomes of her?"

The Collector shrugged his shoulders.  "I have thought of _that_, at all
events.  My coach will be here to take her home.  It lies on my road.
As for me, I shall have to mount at once and ride through the night--a
second test for the back-bone."

"Ride and be hanged to you!" broke out Mr. Trask with a snarl of scorn.
"But for the rest, if your foppery leave you any room to consider the
girl, you couldn't put a worse finish on your injury.  Drive her off in
your coach indeed!--and what then becomes of her reputation?"

"--Of what you have left to her, you mean?  Damn it--_you_ to talk like
this!"

"Do not be profane, Captain Vyell. . . . We see things differently, and
this punishment was meted to her--if cruelly, as you would say--still in
honest concern for her soul's good.  But if you, a loose-living man--"
Mr. Trask paused.

"Go on."

"I thank you.  For the moment I forgot that you are not at liberty.
But I used not that plainness of speech to insult you; rather because it
is part of the argument.  If you, then, drive away with this child in
public, through this town, you do her an injury for which mere
carelessness is your best excuse; and the world will assign it a worse."

"The world!"

"I mean the world this young woman will have to live in.  But we talk at
cross-purposes.  When I asked, 'What becomes of her at the end of this?'
I was thinking of the harm you have already done.  As a fact, I have
ordered my cart to be ready to take her home."

Captain Vyell considered for a few seconds.  "Sir," he said, "since
plain speech is allowed between us, I consider you a narrow bigot; but,
I hasten to add, you are the best man I have met in Port Nassau.  By the
way--that house on our left--does it by chance belong to Mr. Wapshott?"

"It does."

"I thought so.  For a couple of hours past, in the intervals of my
reading, I have discovered a family of tall young women peeking at us
from behind the windows and a barrier of furniture; and once, it seemed
to me, I detected the wattles of your worthy fellow-magistrate.
He ought not to strain that neck; you should warn him of the danger."

"It should have warned you, sir, of what mischief you are doing."

"I seem to remember," the Collector mused, "reading the words '_Honi
soit qui mal y pense_' to-day written on the wall behind you. . . .
Why, damn me, sir, for aught you or any of them can tell, I intend to
marry this girl!  Why not?  Go and tell them.  Could there (you'll say)
be a fairer betrothal?  The reputable plight their troth with a single
ring around the woman's finger; but here are four rings around the four
ankles, and the bar locked.  With your leave, which is the more
symbolical?"

"You are a reprobate man, Captain Vyell," was the answer, "and I have no
relish for your talk.  I will only say this, When her punishment is
done, my cart shall be ready for her; and you, if you would vindicate an
action which--for I'll give you that credit--sprang from a generous
impulse, will go your ways and let this child live down her
humiliation."


Mr. Trask turned and went his way up the alley, across which the sun
made level rays of flame.  The Collector sat in thought.

He turned his head, surprised by the sound of a sob.  A small child had
drawn near--a toddle of four, trailing her wooden doll with its head in
the dust--and stood a few paces in front of Ruth Josselin, round-eyed,
finger at mouth.

"Steady, my girl. . . . Steady!"

At the murmured warning she braced her body stiffly, and no second sob
came.  But the tears ran--the first in all her long agony--and small
shivers, as light winds play on aspen, chased one another down her
throat.  Almost you could guess them passing down her flesh beneath the
sackcloth, rippling over its torn and purple ridges.

He did not check her weeping.  The child--small, innocent cause of it--
stood round-eyed, wondering.  "She has been naughty.  What has she done,
to be so naughty?"

Over the maples the town clock slowly told the hour.

They were free.  The Collector tossed away the half-smoked
tobacco-leaf--his twelfth--drew a long breath, and emitted it with a gay
laugh of relief.  At the same moment he saw Mr. Trask's bullock-cart
approaching down the dappled avenue.



Chapter XII.


THE HUT BY THE BEACH.


"And you'll never hold up your head again!  No more will any of us.
The disgrace of it! the disgrace of it!"

Ruth stood in the middle of the wretched room, with her hands hanging
slack and her eyes bent wearily upon her mother, who had collapsed upon
a block of sawn timber, and sat there, with sack apron cast over her
head, rocking her body.

"Hush, ye fool!" said old Josselin, and spat out of window.
Mechanically, by habit, his dim eyes swept along the beach by the
breakers' edge.  "What's the use, any way?" he added.

"We, that always carried ourselves so high, for all our being poor!
It's God's mercy that took your father before he could see this day.
'Twould have broken his sperrit.  Your father a Josselin, and me a
Pocock, with lands of my own--if right was law in this world; and now to
be stripped naked and marched through the streets!"

Ruth's eyes met the Collector's.  He stood within the doorway, and was
regarding her curiously.  She did not plead or protest; only, as their
eyes met, a flush rose to her cheek, and he guessed rightly that the
touch of shame was for her mother, not for herself.  The flush deepened
as old Josselin turned and said apologetically,--

"You mustn't mind M'ria.  She's weak-minded.  Always was; but sence her
husband was drowned--he was my second son--she've lost whatever wits she
had.  The gal here was born about that time."  Here the old man launched
into some obstetrical guesswork, using the plainest words.
It embarrassed the Collector; the girl did not so much as wince.

"Poor might be stood," moaned the woman; "but poor and shamed!"
Then of a sudden, as though recollecting herself, she arose with an air
of mincing gentility.  "Ruth," she said, "it's little we can offer the
gentleman, but you _might_ get out the bread and cheese, after his being
so kind to you."

"Sit down, you dormed fool," commanded her father-in-law.  "Here, fetch
your seat over to the look-out, an' tell me if that's a log I see
floatin'.  She's wonderful good at that," he explained, without lowering
his voice, "and it'll keep her quiet.  It's true, though, what she said
about the property.  Thousands of acres, if she had her rights--up this
side of the Kennebee."  He jerked a thumb northwards.  "The Pococks
bought it off one of the Gorges, gettin' on for a hundred years sence;
and by rights, as I say, a seventh share oughter be hers.  But lawyers!
The law's like a ship's pump: pour enough in for a start, and it'll
reward ye with floods.  But where's the money to start it?"

The Collector scarcely heard him.  His eyes were on Ruth's face.
He had walked briskly down from the Town Square to the Bowling Green
Inn, refreshed himself, let saddle his horse, and set forth, leaving
orders for his coach to follow.  At the summit of the hill above Port
Nassau he had overtaken the cart with the poor girl lying in it, had
checked his pace to ride alongside, and so, disregarding Mr. Trask's
counsel, had brought her home.  Nay, dismissing the men with a guinea
apiece, he had desired them to return to Mr. Trask and report his
conduct.

"Listen to me," he said suddenly, checking Old Josselin in full flow.
"You say, both of you, that Ruth here will live under disgrace; and I
dare say you are right.  Why not send her away?  Get her out of this."

The woman by the window turned her head with a vague simper.  The old
man, building a small heap of chips on the hearthstone, distended his
cheeks and let out his breath slowly, as though coaxing a fire already
kindled.

"All very well--but where?  And where's the money to come from?
Besides, we can't spare the child; she vittles us.  Dorm it, Ruth," he
exclaimed, on a sudden recollection, "you don't say you ha'n't brought
back the gun!"

"No, grandfather."

"Why? The magistrates would have given it back.  It's ruination for us
without the gun, and that you might have remembered.  Better step over
and ask 'em for it to-morrow."

"Must I?" asked the girl slowly.

"'Course you'll have to," said her grandparent.  "_I_ can't walk the
distance, and that you know.--My eyesight's poor," he explained to the
Collector, "and I can't walk, because--" here he stated an organic
complaint very frankly.  "As for M'ria, she's an eye like a fish-hawk;
but you never saw such a born fool with firearms.  Well, must heat some
water, I reckon, to bathe the poor maid's back."

"First give her food," said the Collector.  He stepped forward and
himself cut her a large manchet from the loaf the old man produced.
She took it from him and ate ravenously, like a young wild animal,
tearing at the crust with her white teeth.  "They haven't broken your
body's health, then," he thought to himself.  Aloud he said, "You don't
quite take my meaning, Mr. Josselin, and I'll put it to you in a
straight offer.  Let her come with me to Boston.  She shall be put to
school there, say for three years; she shall live among folk who will
treat her kindly, and teach her at any rate to build up her spirit again
and be happy, as she will never be within these miles of Port Nassau;
and in return--"

"Ah!" said the old man significantly.

"In return you shall accept from me a decent pension--enough, at any
rate, to fend off want.  We will not quarrel over the amount, up or
down.  Or, if you prefer, I will get the lawyers to look into this claim
of your daughter-in-law's, and maybe make you an offer for it."

"Ah!" repeated Old Josselin, and nodded.  "Taken your eye, has she?
Oh, I'm not blamin' your lordship!  Flesh will after flesh, and--you can
believe it or not--I was all for the women in my time."  He chuckled,
and had added some gross particulars before the younger man could check
him.  Yet the old fellow was so naif and direct that his speech left no
evil taste.  He talked as one might of farm stock.  "But we're decent
folk, we Josselins.  It's hard to starve and be decent too, and times
enough I've been sorry for it; but decent we are."

The Collector frowned.  "Mr. Josselin," he answered, "I am offering you
to take your granddaughter away and have her educated.  What that will
make of her I neither can tell you nor have I means of guessing; but
this I will undertake, and give you my word of honour for it: in three
years' time she shall come back to you in all honesty, unharmed by me or
by any one.  By that time she will be a woman grown, able to decide as a
woman; but she shall come to you, nevertheless."

The old man fumbled with a finger, scraping together the flakes of
touchwood in a tinder-box.

"D'ye hear, M'ria?  His Honour wants our Ruth to go along with him."

The Collector glanced at the girl's face.  Years after, and a hundred
times, he recalled the look with which she turned towards her mother.
At the same instant her mother faced about with a vacuous silly smile.

"Eh?"

"To larn to be a lady," Old Josselin explained, raising his voice as
though she were deaf.

"That would be a fine thing," she answered mincingly, and returned her
gaze to the window and the line of shore.



Chapter XIII.


RUTH SETS OUT.


Manasseh had wrapped Master Dicky up warm in a couple of rugs, and
spread a third about his feet.  In the ample state seat of the coach the
child reclined as easily as in a bed.  He began to doze while the
vehicle yet jolted over the road crossing the headland; and when it
gained the track, and the wheels rolled smoothly on the hard sand, the
motion slid him deep into slumber.

He came out of it with a start and a catch of the breath, and for a full
half-minute lay with all his senses numbed, not so much scared as
bewildered.  In his dreams he had been at home in Boston, and he
searched his little brain, wondering why he was awake, and if he should
call for Miss Quiney (who slept always within hail, in a small bedroom);
and why, when the night-nursery window lay to the left of his bed,
strange lights should be flashing on his right, where the picture of
King William landing at Torbay hung over his washstand.

The lights moved to and fro, then they were quenched, and all was dark
about him.  But he heard Manasseh's voice, some way off, in the
darkness, and the sound of it brought him to his bearings.  He was in
the coach, he remembered; and realising this, he was instantly glad--for
he was a plucky child--that he had not called out to summon Miss Quiney.

Had there been an accident?  At any rate he was not hurt.  His father
had ridden on ahead, and would reach home many hours in advance.
The boy had learnt this from Manasseh.  He reasoned that, if an accident
had happened, his father would not hear of it--would be riding
forward, further and further into the night.  He wondered how Manasseh
and the grooms would manage without his father, who always gave the
orders and was never at a loss.

He sat up, peering out into the night.  He was still peering thus,
building hasty wild guesses, when again a light showed, waving as it
drew nearer.  It came close; it was one of the coach-lamps, and blazed
full into his eyes through the window.  The door opened, letting in the
roar of the beach and smiting his small nostrils with sea-brine, that
with one breath purged away the stuffy scent of leather.

Manasseh was handing some one into the coach.

"De child--Mas' Richard--if you'll tak' care, miss.  He's fas' asleep,
prob'ly."

"But I'm _not_," said Dicky, sitting bolt upright and gathering his rugs
about him.  "Who is it?"

Manasseh perhaps did not hear.  He made no reply, at any rate, but
turned the lamp full on Ruth Josselin as she sank back against the
cushions on Dicky's right.

"You will find plenty rugs, miss."

He shut the door.  Dicky, holding his breath, heard him replace the lamp
in its socket, and felt the soft tilt of his great weight as he climbed
to the perch behind.

"R--right away!"

There was a tug, and the great coach rolled forward.  In the darkness
Dicky caught the sound of a smothered sob.

"Who are you?" he asked.  There was no response, and after a moment he
added, "I know.  You are the girl who put out the fire.  I like you."

He was very sleepy.  He wondered why she did not answer; but, his
childish instinct assuring him that she was a friend, in his somnolence
he felt nothing other than trust in her.  He nestled close in his rugs
and reached out an arm.

It rubbed across the weals on Ruth's back, and was torture.
She clenched her teeth, while tears--tears of physical anguish,
irrepressible--over-brimmed her lashes and fell uncounted in the
darkness.

"You are crying.  Why?  I like you."  The child's voice trailed off into
dream.

"Closer!" whispered Ruth, and would have forced the embrace upon her
pain; but it relaxed.  Dicky's head fell sideways, and rested, angled
between the cushions and her shoulder.

She sat wide-eyed, staring into folds of darkness, while the coach
rolled forward smoothly towards the dawn.





BOOK II.



PROBATION.




Chapter I.


AFTER TWO YEARS.


"Come down and play!"

Ruth, looking down from the open lattice, smiled and shook her head.
"I must not; I'm doing my lessons."

"Must not!" mimicked Master Dick.  "You're getting stupider and
stupider, living up here.  If you don't look out, one of these days
you'll turn into an old maid--just like Miss Quiney."

"Hs-s-sh!  She's downstairs somewhere."

"I don't care if she hears." Dicky ran his eyes defiantly along the line
of ground-floor windows under the verandah, then upturned his face
again.  "After coming all this way on purpose to play with you," he
protested.

"You have made yourself dreadfully hot."

"I _am_ hot," the boy confessed.  "I gave Piggy the slip at the foot of
the hill, and I've run every step of the way."

"Is _he_ here?" Ruth glanced nervously toward a clump of elms around
which the path from the entrance-gate curved into view.  "But you
oughtn't to call Mr. Silk 'Piggy,' you know.  It--it's ungentlemanly."

"Why, I took the name from you!  You said yourself, one day, that he was
a pig; and so he is.  He has piggy eyes, and he eats too much, and
there's something about the back of his neck you must have noticed."

"It's cruel of you, Dicky, to remember and cast up what I said when I
knew no better.  You know how hard I am learning: in the beginning you
helped me to learn."

"Did I?" mused Dicky.  "Then I wish I hadn't, if you're going to grow up
and treat me like this.  Oh, very well," he added stoutly after a pause,
"then I'm learning too, learning to be a sailor; and it'll be first-rate
practice to climb aloft to you, over the verandah.  You don't mind my
spitting on my hands?  It's a way they have in the Navy."

"Dicky, don't be foolish!  Think of Miss Quiney's roses."  Finding him
inexorable, Ruth began to parley.  "I don't want to see Mr. Silk.
But if I come down to you, it will not be to play.  We'll creep off to
the Well, or somewhere out of hail, and there you must let me read--or
perhaps I'll read aloud to you.  Promise?"

"What're you reading?"

"The Bible."

Dicky pulled a face.  "Well, the Bible's English, anyway," he said
resignedly.  The sound of a foreign tongue always made him feel
pugnacious, and it was ever a question with him how, as a gentleman, to
treat a dead language.  Death was respectable, but had its own
obligations; obligations which Greek and Latin somehow ignored.


The house, known as Sabines, stood high on the slope of the midmost of
Boston's three hills, in five acres of ground well set with elms.
Captain Vyell had purchased the site some five years before, and had
built himself a retreat away from the traffic that surged about his
official residence by the waterside.  Of its raucous noises very few--
the rattle of a hawser maybe, or a boatswain's whistle, or the yells of
some stentorian pilot--reached to penetrate the belt of elms surrounding
the house and its green garth; but the Collector had pierced this
woodland with bold vistas through which the eye overlooked Boston
harbour with its moving panorama of vessels, the old fort then standing
where now stands the Navy Yard, and the broad waters of the Charles
sweeping out to the Bay.

For eighteen months he, the master of this demesne, had not set foot
within its front gate; not once since the day when on a sudden
resolution he had installed Ruth Josselin here, under ward of Miss
Quiney, to be visited and instructed in theology, the arts, and the
sciences, by such teachers as that unparagoned spinster might, with his
approval, select.  In practice he left it entirely to her, and Miss
Quiney's taste in teachers was of the austerest.  What nutriment
(one might well have asked) could a young mind extract from the husks of
doctrine and of grammar purveyed to Ruth by the Reverend Malachi
Hichens, her tutor in the Holy Scriptures and in the languages of Greece
and Rome?

The answer is that youth, when youth craves for it, will draw knowledge
even from the empty air and drink it through the very pores of the skin.
Mr. Hichens might be dry--inhumanly dry--and his methods repellent; but
there were the books, after all, and the books held food for her hunger,
wine for her thirst.  So too the harpsichord held music, though Miss
Quiney's touch upon it was formal and lifeless. . . . In these eighteen
months Ruth Josselin had been learning eagerly, teaching herself in a
hundred ways and by devices of which she wist not.  Yet always she was
conscious of the final purpose of this preparation; nay, it possessed
her, mastered her.  For whatever fate her lord designed her, she would
be worthy of it.

He never came.  For eighteen months she had not seen him.  Was it
carelessly or in delicacy that he withheld his face?  Or peradventure in
displeasure?  Her heart would stand still at times, and her face pale
with the fear of it.  She could not bethink her of having displeased
him; but it might well be that he repented of his vast condescension.
Almost without notice, and without any reason given, he had deported her
to this house on the hill. . . . Yet, if he repented, why did he
continue to wrap her around with kindness?  Why had she these good
clothes, and food and drink, servants to wait on her, tutors to teach
her--everything, in short, but liberty and young companions and his
presence that most of all she desired and dreaded?


On the slope to the south-west of the house, in a dingle well screened
with willow and hickory, a stream of water gushed from the living rock
and had been channelled downhill over a stairway of flat boulders, so
that it dropped in a series of miniature cascades before shooting out of
sight over the top of a ferny hollow.  The spot was a favourite one with
Dicky, for between the pendent willow boughs, as through a frame, it
overlooked the shipping and the broad bosom of the Charles.  Ruth and he
stole away to it, unperceived of Miss Quiney; to a nook close beside the
spray of the fall, where on a boulder the girl could sit and read while
Dick wedged his back into a cushion of moss, somewhat higher up the
slope, and recumbent settled himself so as to bring (luxurious young
dog!) her face in profile between him and the shining distance.

She had stipulated for silence while she read her lesson over; but he at
once began to beg off.

"If you won't let me talk," he grumbled, "the least you can do is to
read aloud."

"But it's the Bible," she objected.

"Oh, well, I don't mind.  Only choose something interesting.  David and
Goliath, or that shipwreck in the Acts."

"You don't seem to understand that this is a lesson, and I must read
what Mr. Hichens sets.  To-day it's about Hagar and Ishmael."

"I seem to forget about them; but fire away, and we'll hope there's a
story in it."

Ruth began to read: "_And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which
she had born unto Abraham, mocking her.  Wherefore she said unto
Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman_. . ."