There was a lot of silly talk in it, quite different from the fighting.

I remember, though, he said he was coming around here for his honeymoon; and I'm glad, on the whole."

"On the whole? When you've dreamed, all this while, of seeing your uncle and growing up to be like him!"

"I mean that on the whole I'm glad he is married. It--it shows the two things can go together after all; and, Ruth--"

She turned in some wonderment as his voice faltered, and wondered more at sight of his young face. It was crimson.

"No, please! I want you not to look," he entreated. "I want you to turn your face away and listen . . . Ruth," he blurted, "I love you better than anybody in the whole world!"

"Dear d.i.c.ky!"

"--and I think you're the loveliest person that ever was--besides being the best."

"It's lovely of you, at any rate, to think so." Ruth, forgetting his command, turned her eyes again on d.i.c.ky, and they were dewy. For indeed she loved him and his boyish chivalrous ways. Had he not been her friend from the first, taking her in perfect trust, and in the hour that had branded her and in her dreams seared her yet? Often, yet, in the mid-watches of the night she started out of sleep and lay quivering along her exquisite body from head to heel, while the awful writing awoke and crawled and ate again, etching itself upon her flesh.

"But--but it made me miserable!" choked d.i.c.ky.

"Miserable! Why?"

"Because I wanted to grow up and marry you," he managed to say defiantly. "And the two things didn't seem to fit at all. I couldn't make them fit. But of course," he went on in a cheerfuller voice, the worst of his confession over, "if Uncle Harry can be married, why shouldn't we?"

She bent her head low over the book. Calf-love is absurd, but so honest, so serious; and like all other sweet natural foolishness should be sacred to the pure of heart.

"I ought to tell you something though," he went on gravely and hesitated.

"Yes, d.i.c.ky! What is it?"

"Well, I don't quite know what it means, and I don't like to ask any one else. Perhaps you can tell me. . . . I wouldn't ask it if it weren't that I'd hate to take you in; or if I could find out any other way."

"But what is it, dear?"

"Something against me. I can't tell what, though I've looked at myself again and again in the gla.s.s, trying." He met her eyes bravely, with an effort. "Ruth, dear--what is a b.a.s.t.a.r.d?"

Ruth sat still. Her palms were folded, one upon another, over the book on her knees.

"But what is it?" he pleaded.

"It means," she said quietly, "a child whose father and mother are not married--not properly married."

A pause followed--a long pause--and the tumbling cascade sounded louder and louder in Ruth's ears, while d.i.c.ky considered.

"Do you think," he asked at length "that papa was not properly married to my mother?"

"No, dear--no. And even if that were so, what difference could it make to my loving you?"

"It wouldn't make any! Sure?"

"Sure."

"But it might make a difference to papa," he persisted, "if ever papa had another child--like Abraham, you know--" Here he jumped to his feet, for she had risen of a sudden. "Why, what is the matter?"

She held out a hand. There were many dragon-flies by the fall, and for the moment he guessed that one of them had stung her.

"d.i.c.ky," she said. "Whatever happens, you and I will be friends always."

"Always," he echoed, taking her hand and ready to search for the mark of the sting. But her eyes were fastened on the water bubbling from the well head.

A branch creaked aloft, and to the right of the well head the hickory bushes rustled and parted.

"So here are the truants!" exclaimed a voice. "Good-morning, Miss Josselin!"

Chapter II.

MR. SILK.

The Reverend Nahum Silk, B.A., sometime of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, had first arrived in America as a missioner seeking a sphere of labour in General Oglethorpe's new colony of Georgia. He was then (1733-4) a young man, newly admitted to priest's orders, and undergoing what he took to be a crisis of the soul. Sensual natures, such as his, not uncommonly suffer in youth a combustion of religious sentiment.

The fervour is short-lived, the flame is expelled by its own blast, and leaves a house swept and garnished, inviting devils.

For the hard fare of Georgia he soon began to seek consolations, and early in the second year of his ministry a sufficiently gross scandal tumbled him out of the little colony. Lacking the grit to return to England and face out his relatives' displeasure, he had drifted northwards to Ma.s.sachusetts, and there had picked up with a slant of luck. A number of G.o.dly and well-to-do citizens of Boston had recently banded themselves into an a.s.sociation for supplying religious opportunities to the seamen frequenting the port, and to the Committee Mr. Silk commended himself by a hail-fellow manner and a shrewdness of speech which, since it showed through a coat of unction, might be supposed to mean shrewdness in grain. Cunning indeed the man could be, for his short ends; but his shrewdness began and ended in a trick of talking, and in the conduct of life he trimmed sail to his appet.i.tes.

His business of missioner (or, as he jocosely put it, Chaplain of the Fleet) soon brought him to the notice of Captain Vyell, Collector of Customs, with whom by the same trick of speech (slightly adapted) he managed to ingratiate himself, scenting the flesh-pots. For he belonged to the tribe to whom a patron never comes amiss. Captain Vyell was amused by the man; knew him for a sycophant; but tolerated him at table and promoted him (in Batty Langton's phrase) to be his trencher chaplain. He and Langton took an easy malicious delight, over their wine, in shocking Mr. Silk with their free thought and seeing how "the dog swallowed it."

The dog swallowed his dirty puddings very cleverly, and with just so much show of protest as he felt to be due to his Orders. He had the accent of an English gentleman and enough of the manner to pa.s.s muster.

But the Collector erred when he said that "Silk was only a beast in his cups," and he erred with a carelessness well-nigh wicked when he made the man d.i.c.ky's tutor.

This step had coincided with the relegation of Ruth and Miss Quiney to Sabines; but whether by chance or of purpose no one but the Collector could tell. Of his intentions toward the girl he said nothing, even to Batty Langton. Very likely they were not clear to himself. He knew well enough how fast and far gossip travelled in New England; and doubted not at all that his adventure at Port Na.s.sau had within a few days been whispered and canva.s.sed throughout Boston. His own grooms, no doubt, had talked. But he could take a scornful amus.e.m.e.nt in baffling speculation while he made up his own mind. In one particular only he had been prompt--in propitiating Miss Quiney. On reaching home, some hours ahead of the girl, he had summoned Miss Quiney to his library and told her the whole story. The interview on her part had been exclamatory and tearful; but the good lady, with all her absurdities, was a Christian. She was a woman too, and delighted to serve an overmastering will. She had left him with a promise to lay her conscience in prayer before the Lord; and, next morning, Ruth's beauty had done the rest.

"Good-morning, Miss Josselin!" Ruth started and glanced up the slope with a shiver. The voice of Mr. Silk always curdled her flesh.

"La! la!" went on Mr. Silk, nodding down admiration. "What a group to startle!--Cupid extracting a thorn from the hand of Venus--or (shall we say?) the Love G.o.d, having wounded his mother in sport, kisses the scratch to make it well. Ha, ha!"

"Shall I continue, sir?" said Ruth, recovering herself. "The pair are surprised by a satyr who crept down to the spring to bathe his aching head--"

"Hard on me, as usual!" Mr. Silk protested, climbing down the slope.

"But 'tis the privilege of beauty to be cruel. As it happens, I drank moderately last night, and I come with a message from the Diana of these groves. Miss Quiney wishes to communicate to you some news I have had the honour to bring in a letter from Captain Vyell--or, as we must now call him, Sir Oliver."

"Sir Oliver?" echoed Ruth, not understanding at all.

"The _Fish-hawk_ arrived in harbour this morning with the English mail-bags; and the Collector has letters informing him that his uncle, Sir Thomas Vyell, is dead after a short illness--the cause, jail fever, contracted while serving at Launceston, in Cornwall, on the Grand Jury."

"Captain Vyell succeeds?"