The fate of the little boy was never known until then, and then it was only known that he had lived and died and was buried in Skylight.

We found houses and lands, but no record that they were ours.  So we left them under British rule, and returned to Skylight, to our cottage and duty.

Aunt Carter came in before we had been an hour at home.  I think she watched the opportunity of Saul’s absence to find me alone.

“See!” she exclaimed, holding up to my view a small eminence of stockings, “see what I have done, while you’ve just been going about the world doing nothing at all!” And with a really warm shake of my hand, Aunt Carter seated herself, for the second time, in Saul’s chair.

“Why, I’ve been knitting too!” I said, in extenuation.

“What?” asked Aunt Carter.  “Some new-fashioned thing or other, I’ll warrant.”

“No,—­something that is as old as Eve.”

“Who ever beard of Eve’s knitting?  The Bible doesn’t say one word about it, Mrs. Monten.  Besides, I don’t think little Cain and Abel wore stockings at all.”

“I did not say that Eve knit in Paradise.  I only said I’d been knitting at something as old as Eve.  I meant the thread of life.  Here comes my husband to tell you how industrious I have been.”

Saul led Aunt Carter on to talk of her youth, and gradually of his father, until he had learned all that she knew of his history.  It was very little:  only that a fur-trader and a party of Dacotahs came to the village, she had heard her father say, to sell their skins, bringing a brown little boy with them; that the child fell sick with scarlet fever, and they left him to the mercy of the village people, and never came back for him, although they had said they would.

Did Luella give her boy away?—­Never, I was convinced, and Saul likewise.

Saul went back into his round of professional duties, and with much heart for a while.

Delighted with civilization, and peopled with memories, and joyous with the divine plumage ever hovering around me, my life ran on.  I watched Saul narrowly.  He would often take up his hat, after hours of application to science, and rush out of the house, as if a mission lay before him.  He would come back, and devote himself to me, as if he were conscious of some neglect in his absence.  I planned short excursions all over the adjacent country.  I became addicted to angling, because I saw Saul liked it.  There were many righteous eyeballs that reproved me for wandering in places not fit for a woman, and Aunt Carter became exceedingly disturbed, even to the point of remonstrance.

“You’re spoiling your husband,” she would say,—­“he’ll not know but what you are a squaw,” she said to me one day, in true distress.

However, I endured it delightfully for three years.  Saul received in one week four letters, each containing the offer of a professor’s chair in a desirable institution.