Next morning he saw her again.
He had left his very new law office, just around in Bienville Street, and had come but a few steps down Royal, when, at the next corner below, she turned into Royal, toward him, out of Conti, coming from Bourbon.
The same nine-year-old negro boy was at her side, as spotless in broad white collar and blue jacket as on the morning before, and carrying the same droll air of consecration, awe, and responsibility. The young man envied him.
Yesterday, for the first time, at that same corner, he had encountered this fair stranger and her urchin escort, abruptly, as they were making the same turn they now repeated, and all in a flash had wondered who might be this lovely apparition. Of such patrician beauty, such elegance of form and bearing, such witchery of simple attire, and such un-Italian yet Latin type, in this antique Creole, modernly Italianized quarter--who and what, so early in the day, down here among the shops, where so meagre a remnant of the old high life clung on in these balconied upper stories--who, what, whence, whither, and wherefore?
In that flash of time she had passed, and the very liveliness of his interest, combined with the urchin's consecrated awe--not to mention his own mortifying remembrance of one or two other-day lapses from the austerities of the old street--restrained him from a backward glance until he could cross the way as if to enter the great, white, lately completed court-house. Then both she and her satellite had vanished.
He turned again, but not to enter the building. His watch read but half past eight, and his first errand of the day, unless seeing her had been his first, was to go one square farther on, for a look at the wreckers tearing down the old Hotel St. Louis. As he turned, a man neat of dress and well beyond middle age made him a suave gesture.
"Sir, if you please. You are, I think, Mr. Chester, notary public and attorney at law?"
"That is my name and trade, sir." Evidently Mr. Geoffry Chester was also an American, a Southerner.
"Pardon," said his detainer, "I have only my business card." He tendered it: "Marcel Castanado, Masques et Costumes, No. 312, rue Royale, entre Bienville et Conti."
"I diz-ire your advice," he continued, "on a very small matter neither notarial, neither of the law. Yet I must pay you for that, if you can make your charge as--as small as the matter."
The young lawyer's own matters were at a juncture where a fee was a godsend, yet he replied:
"If your matter is not of the law I can make you no charge."
The costumer shrugged: "Pardon, in that case I must seek elsewhere." He would have moved on, but Chester asked:
"What kind of advice do you want if not legal?"
"Literary."
The young man smiled: "Why, I'm not literary."
"I think yes. You know Ovide Landry? Black man? Secon'-han' books, Chartres Street, just yonder?"
"Yes, very pleasantly, for I love old books."
"Yes, and old buildings, and their histories. I know. You are now going down, as I have just been, to see again the construction of that old dome they are dim-olishing yonder, of the once state-house, previously Hotel St. Louis. I know. Twice a day you pass my shop. I am compelled to see, what Ovide also has told me, that, like me and my wife, you have a passion for the poétique and the pittoresque!"
"Yes," Chester laughed, "but that's my limit. I've never written a line for print----"
"This writing is done, since fifty years."
"I've never passed literary judgment on a written page and don't suppose I ever shall."
"The judgment is passed. The value of the article is pronounced great--by an expert amateur."
"SHE?" the youth silently asked himself. He spoke: "Why, then what advice do you still want--how to find a publisher?"
"No, any publisher will jump at that. But how to so nig-otiate that he shall not be the lion and we the lamb!"
Chester smiled again: "Why, if that's the point--" he mused. The hope came again that this unusual shopman and his wish had something to do with her.
"If that's the advice you want," he resumed, "I think we might construe it as legal, though worth at the most a mere notarial fee."
"And contingent on--?" the costumer prompted.
"Contingent, yes, on the author's success."
"Sir! I am not the author of a manuscript fifty years old!"
"Well, then, on the holder's success. You can agree to that, can't you?"
"'Tis agreed. You are my counsel. When will you see the manuscript?"
"Whenever you choose to leave it with me."
The costumer's smile was firm: "Sir, I cannot permit that to pass from my hand."
"Oh! then have a copy typed for me."
The Creole soliloquized: "That would be expensive." Then to Chester: "Sir, I will tell you; to-night come at our parlor, over the shop. I will read you that!" "Shall we be alone?" asked Chester, hoping his client would say no.
"Only excepting my"--a tender brightness--"my wife!" Then a shade of regret: "We are without children, me and my wife."
His wife. H'mm! She? That amazing one who had vanished within a few yards of his bazaar of "masques et costumes"? Though to Chester New Orleans was still new, and though fat law-books and a slim purse kept him much to himself, he was aware that, while some Creoles grew rich, many of them, women, once rich, were being driven even to stand behind counters. Yet no such plight could he imagine of that bewildering young--young luminary who, this second time, so out of time, had gleamed on him from mystery's cloud. His earlier hope came a third time: "Excepting only your wife, you say? Why not also your amateur expert?"
"I am sorry, but"--the Latin shrug--"that is--that is not possible."
"Have I ever seen your wife? She's not a tallish, slender young-----?"
"No, my wife is neither. She's never in the street or shop. She has no longer the cap-acity. She's become so extraordinarily un-slender that the only way she can come down-stair' is backward. You'll see. Well,"--he waved--"till then--ah, a word: my close bargaining--I must explain you that--in confidence. 'Tis because my wife and me we are anxious to get every picayune we can get for the owners--of that manuscript."
Chester thought to be shrewd: "Oh! is she hard up? the owner?"
"The owners are three," Castanado calmly said, "and two dip-end on the earnings of a third." He bowed himself away.
A few hours later Chester received from him a note begging indefinite postponement of the evening appointment. Mme. Castanado had fever and probably la grippe.
Early one day some two weeks after the foregoing incident the young lawyer came out of his pension francaise, opposite his office, and stood a moment in thought. In those two weeks he had not again seen Mr. Castanado.
Once more it was scant half past eight. He looked across to the windows of his office and of one bare third-story sleeping-room over it. Eloquent windows! Their meanness reminded him anew how definitely he had chosen not merely the simple but the solitary life. Yet now he turned toward Royal Street. But at the third or fourth step he faced about toward Chartres. The distance to the courthouse was the same either way, and its entrances were alike on both streets.
Thought he as he went the Chartres Street way: "If I go one more time by way of Royal I shall owe an abject apology, and yet to try to offer it would only make the matter worse."
He went grimly, glad to pay this homage of avoidance which would have been more to his credit paid a week or so earlier. His frequent failure to pay it had won him, each time, a glimpse of her and an itching fear that prying eyes were on him inside other balconied windows besides those of the unslender Mme. Castanado.
Temptation is a sly witch. Down at Conti Street, on the court-house's upper riverside corner, he paused to take in the charm of one of the most picturesque groups of old buildings in the vieux carré. But there, to gather in all the effect, one must turn, sooner or later, and include the upper side of Conti Street from Chartres to Royal; and as Chester did so, yonder, once more, coming from Bourbon and turning from Conti into Royal, there she was again, the avoided one!
Her black cupid was at her side, tiny even for nine years. They disappeared conversing together. With his heart in his throat Chester turned away, resumed his walk, and passed into the marble halls where justice dreamt she dwelt. Up and down one of these, little traversed so early, he paced, with a question burning in his breast, which every new sigh of mortification fanned hotter: Had she seen him?--this time? those other times? And did those Castanados suspect? Was that why Mme. Castanado had the grippe, and the manuscript was yet unread?
A voice spoke his name and he found himself facing the very black dealer in second-hand books.
"I was yonder at Toulouse Street," said Ovide Landry, "coming up-town, when I saw you at Conti coming down. I have another map of the old city for you. At that rate, Mr. Chester, you'll soon have as good a collection as the best."
The young man was pleased: "Does it show exactly where Maspero's Exchange stood?" he asked.
Ovide said come to the shop and see.
"I will, to-day; at six." Another man came up, "Ah, Mr. Castanado! How--how is your patient?"
"Madame"--the costumer smiled happily--"is once more well. I was looking for you. You didn't pass in Royal Street this morning."
[Ah, those eyes behind those windows behind those balconies!]
"No, I--oh! going, Landry? Good day. No, Mr. Castanado, I----"
"Madame hopes Mr. Chezter can at last, this evening, come at home for that reading."
"Mr. Castanado, I can't! I'm mighty sorry! My whole evening's engaged. So is to-morrow's. May I come the next evening after? . . . Thank you. . . . Yes, at seven. Just the three of us, of course? Yes."
Six o'clock found Chester in Ovide's bookshop.
Had its shelves borne law-books, or had he not needed for law-books all he dared spend, he might have known the surprisingly informed and refined shopman better. Ovide had long been a celebrity. Lately a brief summary of his career had appeared incidentally in a book, a book chiefly about others, white people. "You can't write a Southern book and keep us out," Ovide himself explained.
Even as it was, Chester had allowed himself that odd freedom with Landry which Southerners feel safe in under the plate armor of their race distinctions. Receiving his map he asked, as he looked along a shelf or two: "Have you that book that tells of you--as a slave? your master letting you educate yourself; your once refusing your freedom, and your being private secretary to two or three black lieutenant-governors?"
"I had a copy," Landry said, "but I've sold it. Where did you hear of it? From Réné Ducatel, in his antique-shop, whose folks 'tis mostly about?"
"Yes. An antique himself, in spirit, eh? Yet modern enough to praise you highly."
"H'mm! but only for the virtues of a slave."
Chester smiled round from the shelves: "I noticed that! I'm afraid we white folks, the world over, are prone to do that--with you-all."
"Yes, when you speak of us at all."
"Ducatel's opposite neighbor," Chester remarked, "is an antique even more interesting."
"Ah, yes! Castanado is antique only in that art spirit which the tourist trade is every day killing even in Royal Street."
"That's the worst decay in this whole decaying quarter," the young man said.
"And in all this deluge of trade spirit," Ovide continued, "the best dry land left of it--of that spirit of art--is----"
"Castanado's shop, I dare say."
"Castanado's and three others in that one square you pass every day without discovering the fact. But that's natural; you are a busy lawyer."
"Not so very. What are the other three?"
"First, the shop of Seraphine Alexandre, embroideries; then of Scipion Beloiseau, ornamental ironwork, opposite Mme. Seraphine and next below Ducatel--Ducatel, alas, he don't count; and third, of Placide La Porte, perfumeries, next to Beloiseau. That's all."
"Not the watchmaker on the square above?"
"Ah! distantly he's of them: and there was old Manouvrier, taxidermist; but he's gone--where the spirits of art and of worship are twin." Chester turned sharply again to the shelves and stood rigid. From an inner room, its glass door opened by Ovide's silver-spectacled wife, came the little black cupid and his charge. Ah, once more what perfection in how many points! As she returned to Ovide an old magazine, at last he heard her voice--singularly deep and serene. She thanked the bookman for his loan and, with the child, went out.
It disturbed the Southern youth to unbosom himself to a black man, but he saw no decent alternative: "Landry, I had not the faintest idea that that young lady was nearer than Castanado's shop!"
Ovide shook his head: "You seem yourself to forget that you are here by business appointment. And what of it if you have seen her, or she seen you, here--or anywhere?"
"Only this: that I've met her so often by pure--by chance, on that square you speak of, I bound for the court-house, she for I can't divine where--for I've never looked behind me!--that I've had to take another street to show I'm a gentleman. This very morn'--oh!--and now! here! How can I explain--or go unexplained?"
Ovide lifted a hand: "Will you leave that to my wife, so unlearned yet so wise and good? For the young lady's own sake my wife, without explaining, will see that you are not misjudged."
"Good! Right! Any explanation would simply belie itself. Yes, let her do it! But, Landry----"
"Yes?"
"For heaven's sake don't let her make me out a goody-goody. I haven't got this far into life without making moral mistakes, some of them huge. But in this thing--I say it only to you--I'm making none. I'm neither a marrying man, a villain, nor an ass."
Ovide smiled: "My wife can manage that. Maybe it's good you came here. It may well be that the young lady herself would be glad if some one explained her to you."
"Hoh! does an angel need an explanation?"
"I should say, in Royal Street, yes."
"Then for mercy's sake give it! right here! you! come!" The youth laughed. "Mercy to me, I mean. But--wait! Tell me; couldn't Castanado have given it, as easily as you?"
"You never gave Castanado this chance."
"How do you know that? Oh, never mind, go ahead--full speed."
"Well, she's an orphan, of a fine old family----"
"Obviously! Creole, of course, the family?"
"Yes, though always small in Louisiana. Creole except one New England grandmother. But for that one she would not have been here just now."
"Humph! that's rather obscure but--go on."
"Her parents left her without a sou or a relation except two maiden aunts as poor as she."
"Antiques?"
"Yes. She earns their living and her own."
"You don't care to say how?"
"She wouldn't like it. 'Twould be to say where."
"She seems able to dress exquisitely."
"Mr. Chester, a woman would see with what a small outlay that is done. She has that gift for the needle which a poet has for the pen."
"Ho! that's charmingly antique. But now tell me how having a Yankee grandmother caused her to drop in here just now. Your logic's dim."
"You are soon to go to Castanado's to see that manuscript story, are you not?"
"Oh, is it a story? Have you read it?"
"Yes, I've read it, 'tis short. They wanted my opinion. And 'tis a story, though true."
"A story! Love story? very absorbing?"
"No, it is not of love--except love of liberty. Whether 'twill absorb you or no I cannot say. Me it absorbed because it is the story of some of my race, far from here and in the old days, trying, in the old vain way, to gain their freedom."
"Has--has mademoiselle read it?"
"Certainly. It is her property; hers and her two aunts'. Those two, they bought it lately, of a poor devil--drinking man--for a dollar. They had once known his mother, from the West Indies."
"He wrote it, or his mother?"
"The mother, long ago. 'Tis not too well done. It absorbs mademoiselle also, but that is because 'tis true. When I saw that effect I told her of a story like it, yet different, and also seeming true, in this old magazine. And when I began to tell it she said, 'It is true! My Vermont grand'mère wrote that! It happened to her!'"
"How queer! And, Landry, I see the connection. Your magazine being one of a set, you couldn't let her read it anywhere but here."
"I have to keep my own rules."
"Let me see it. . . . Oh, now, why not? What was the use of either of us explaining if--if----?"
But Ovide smilingly restored the thing to its stack. "Now," he said, "'tis Mr. Chester's logic that fails." Yet as he turned to a customer he let Chester take it down.
"My job requires me," the youth said, "to study character. Let's see what a grand'mère of a 'tite-fille, situated so and so, will do."
Ovide escorted his momentary customer to the sidewalk door. As he returned, Chester, rolling map and magazine together, said:
"It's getting dark. No, don't make a light, it's your closing time and I've a strict engagement. Here's a deposit for this magazine; a fifty. It's all I have--oh, yes, take it, we'll trade back to-morrow. You must keep your own rules and I must read this thing before I touch my bed."
"Even the first few lines absorb you?"
"No, far from it. Look here." Chester read out: "'Now, Maud,' said my uncle--Oh, me! Landry, if the tale's true why that old story-book pose?"
"It may be that the writer preferred to tell it as fiction, and that only something in me told me 'tis true. Something still tells me so."
"'Now, Maud,'" Chester smilingly thought to himself when, the evening's later engagement being gratifyingly fulfilled, he sat down with the story. "And so you were grand'mère to our Royal Street miracle. And you had a Southern uncle! So had I! though yours was a planter, mine a lawyer, and yours must have been fifty years the older. Well, 'Now, Maud,' for my absorption!"
It came. Though the tale was unamazing amazement came. The four chief characters were no sooner set in motion than Chester dropped the pamphlet to his knee, agape in recollection of a most droll fact a year or two old, which now all at once and for the first time arrested his attention. He also had a manuscript! That lawyer uncle of his, saying as he spared him a few duplicate volumes from his law library, "Burn that if you don't want it," had tossed him a fat document indorsed: "Memorandum of an Early Experience." Later the nephew had glanced it over, but, like "Maud's" story, its first few lines had annoyed his critical sense and he had never read it carefully. The amazing point was that "Now, Maud" and this "Memorandum" most incredibly--with a ridiculous nicety--fitted each other.
He lifted the magazine again and, beginning at the beginning a third time, read with a scrutiny of every line as though he studied a witness's deposition. And this was what he read:
"Now, Maud," said uncle jovially as he, aunt, and I drove into the confines of their beautiful place one spring afternoon of 1860, "don't forget that to be too near a thing is as bad for a good view of it as to be too far away."
I was a slim, tallish girl of scant sixteen, who had never seen a slaveholder on his plantation, though I had known these two for years, and loved them dearly, as guests in our Northern home before it was broken up by the death of my mother. Father was an abolitionist, and yet he and they had never had a harsh word between them. If the general goodness of those who do some particular thing were any proof that that particular thing is good to do, they would have convinced me, without a word, that slaveholding was entirely right. But they were not trying to do any such thing. "Remember," continued my uncle, smiling round at me, "your dad's trusting you not to bring back our honest opinion--of anything--in place of your own."
"Maud," my aunt hurried to put in, for she knew the advice I had just heard was not the kind I most needed, "you're going to have for your own maid the blackest girl you ever saw."
"And the best," added my uncle; "she's as good as she is black."
"She's no common darky, that Sidney," said aunt. "She'll keep you busy answering questions, my dear, and I say now, you may tell her anything she wants to know; we give you perfect liberty; and you may be just as free with Hester; that's her mother; or with her father, Silas."
"We draw the line at Mingo," said uncle.
"And who is Mingo?" I inquired.
"Mingo? he's her brother; a very low and trailing branch of the family tree."
As we neared the house I was told more of the father and mother; their sweet content, their piety, their diligence. "If we lived in town, where there's better chance to pick up small earnings," remarked uncle, "those two and Sidney would have bought their freedom by now, and Mingo's too. Silas has got nearly enough to buy his own, as it is."
Silas, my aunt explained, was a carpenter. "He hands your uncle so much a week; all he can make beyond that he's allowed to keep." The carriage stopped at the door; half a dozen servants came, smiling, and I knew Sidney and Hester at a glance, they were so finely different from their fellows.
That night the daughter and I made acquaintance. She was eighteen, tall, lithe and as straight as an arrow. She had not one of the physical traits that so often make her race uncomely to our eyes; even her nose was good; her very feet were well made, her hands were slim and shapely, the fingers long and neatly jointed, and there was nothing inky in her amazing blackness, her red blood so enriched it. Yet she was as really African in her strong, eager mind as in her color, and the English language, on her tongue, was like a painter's palette and brushes in the hands of a monkey. Her first question to me after my last want was supplied came cautiously, after a long gaze at my lighted lamp, from a seat on the floor. "Miss Maud, when was de conwention o' coal-oil 'scuvvud?" And to her good night she added, in allusion to my eventual return to the North, "I hope it be a long time afo' you make dat repass!"
At the next bedtime she began on me with the innocent question of my favorite flower, but I had not answered three other questions before she had placed me where I must either say I did not believe in the right to hold slaves, or must keep silence; and when I kept silence of course she knew. For a long moment she dropped her eyes, and then, with a soft smile, asked if I would tell her some Bible stories, preferably that of "Moses in de boundaries o' Egyp'."
She listened in gloating silence, rarely interrupting; but at the words, "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, 'Let my people go,'" the response, "Pra-aise Gawd!" rose from her lips in such volume that she threw her hands to her mouth. After that she spoke only soft queries, but they grew more and more significant, and I soon saw that her supposed content was purely a pious endurance, and that her soul felt bondage as her body would have felt a harrow. So I left the fugitives of Egyptian slavery under the frown of the Almighty in the wilderness of Sin; Sidney was trusting me; uncle and aunt were trusting me; and between them I was getting into a narrow corner. After a meditative silence my questioner asked:
"Miss Maud, do de Bible anywhuz capitulate dat Moses aw Aaron aw Joshaway aw Cable buy his freedom--wid money?"
Her manner was childlike, yet she always seemed to come up out of deep thought when she asked a question; she smiled diffidently until the reply began to come, then took on a reverential gravity, and as soon as it was fully given sank back into thought. "Miss Maud, don't you reckon dat ef Moses had a-save' up money enough to a-boughtened his freedom, dat'd a-been de wery sign mos' pleasin' to Gawd dat he 'uz highly fitten to be sot free widout paying?" To that puzzle she waited for no answer beyond the distress I betrayed, but turned to matters less speculative, and soon said good night.
On the third evening--my! If I could have given all the topography of the entire country between uncle's plantation and my native city on the margin of the Great Lakes, with full account of its every natural and social condition, her questions would have wholly gathered them in. She asked if our climate was very hard on negroes; what clothing we wore in summer, and how we kept from freezing in midwinter; about wages, the price of food, what crops were raised, and what the "patarolers" did with a negro when they caught one at night without a pass.
She made me desperate, and when the fourth night saw her crouched on my floor it found me prepared; I plied her with questions from start to finish. She yielded with a perfect courtesy; told of the poor lot of the few free negroes of whom she knew, and of the time-serving and shifty indolence, the thievishness, faithlessness, and unaspiring torpidity of "some niggehs"; and when I opened the way for her to speak of uncle and aunt she poured forth their praises with an ardor that brought her own tears. I asked her if she believed she could ever be happy away from them.
She smiled with brimming eyes: "Why, I dunno, Miss Maud; whatsomeveh come, and whensomeveh, and howsomeveh de Lawd sen' it, ef us feels his ahm und' us, us ought to be 'shame' not to be happy, oughtn't us?" All at once she sprang half up: "I tell you de Lawd neveh gi'n no niggeh de rights to snuggle down anywhuz an' fo'git de auction-block!"
As suddenly the outbreak passed, yet as she settled down again her exaltation still showed through her fond smile. "You know what dat inqui'ance o' yone bring to my 'memb'ance? Dass ow ole Canaan hymn----
"'O I mus' climb de stony hill
Pas' many a sweet desiah,
De flow'ry road is not fo' me,
I follows cloud an' fiah.'"
After she was gone I lay trying so to contrive our next conversation that it should not flow, as all before it had so irresistibly done, into that one deep channel of her thoughts which took in everything that fell upon her mind, as a great river drinks the rains of all its valleys. Presently the open window gave me my cue: the stars! the unvexed and unvexing stars, that shone before human wrongs ever began, and that will be shining after all human wrongs are ended--our talk should be of them.
At the supper-table on the following evening I became convinced of something which I had felt coming for two or three days, wondering the while whether Sidney did not feel the same thing. When we rose aunt drew me aside and with caressing touches on my brow and temples said she was sorry to be so slow in bringing me into social contact with the young people of the neighboring plantations, but that uncle, on his arrival at home, had found a letter whose information had kept him, and her as well, busy every waking hour since. "And this evening," she continued, "we can't even sit down with you around the parlor lamp. Can you amuse yourself alone, dear, or with Sidney, while your uncle and I go over some pressing matters together?"
Surely I could. "Auntie, was the information--bad news?"
"It wasn't good, my dear; I may tell you about it to-morrow."
"Hadn't I better go back to father at once?"
"Oh, my child, not for our sake; if you're not too lonesome we'd rather keep you. Let me see; has Mingo ever danced for you? Why, tell Sidney to make Mingo come dance for you."
Mingo came; his leaps, turns, postures, steps, and outcries were a most laughable wonder, and I should have begged for more than I did, but I saw that it was a part of Sidney's religion to disapprove the dance.
"Sidney," I said, "did you ever hear of the great clock in the sky? Yes, there's one there; it's made all of stars." We were at the foot of some veranda steps that faced the north, and as she and Mingo were about to settle down at my feet I said if they would follow me to the top of the flight I would tell this marvel: what the learned believed those eternal lamps to be; why some were out of view three-fourths of the night, others only half, others not a quarter; how a very few never sank out of sight at all except for daylight or clouds, and yet went round and round with all the others; and why I called those the clock of heaven; which gained, each night, four minutes, and only four, on the time we kept by the sun.
"Pra-aise Gawd!" murmured Sidney. "Miss Maud, please hol' on tell Mingo run' fetch daddy an' mammy; dey don't want dat sto'y f'om me secon' haynded!" Mingo darted off and we waited. "Miss Maud, what de white folks mean by de nawth stah? Is dey sich a stah as de nawth stah?"
I tried to explain that since all this seeming movement of the stars around us was but our own daily and yearly turning, there would necessarily be two opposite points on our earth which would never move at all, and that any star directly in line with those two points would seem as still as they.
"Like de p'int o' de spin'le on de spinnin'-wheel, Miss Maud? Oh, yass, I b'lieve I un'stand dat; I un'stan' it some."
I showed her the north star, and told her how to find it; and then I took from my watch-guard a tiny compass and let her see how it forever picked out from among all the stars of heaven that one small light, and held quiveringly to it. She hung over it with ecstatic sighs. "Do it see de stah, Miss Maud, like de wise men o' de Eas' see de stah o' Jesus?"
I tried to make plain the law it was obeying.
"And do it p'int dah dess de same in de broad day, an' all day long?--Pra-aise Gawd! And do it p'int dah in de rain, an' in de stawmy win' a-fulfillin' of his word, when de ain't a single stah admissible in de ske-eye?--De Lawd's na-ame be pra-aise'!" Her father, mother, and brother were all looking at it with her, now, and she glanced from one to another with long heavings of rapture.
"Miss Maud," said Silas, in a subdued voice, "dat little trick mus' 'a' cos' you a mint o' money."
"Silas," put in Hester, "you know dass not a pullite question!" But she was ravening for its answer, and I said I had bought it for twenty-five cents. They laughed with delight. Yet, when I told Sidney she might have it, her thanks were but two words, which her lips seemed to drop unconsciously while she gazed on the trinket.