and all the fine things there, and never thinks of you more until he comes back to Virginia and sees you last May Day at Jamestown.  Next morning he comes riding to the glebe house.  ‘And so,’ he says to Darden, ’and so my little maid that I brought for trophy out of the Appalachian Mountains is a woman grown?  Faith, I’d quite forgot the child; but Saunderson tells me that you have not forgot to draw upon my Oronoko.’  That’s all the remembrance you were held in, Audrey.”

She paused to take breath, and to look with shrewish triumph at the girl who leaned against the wall.  “I like not waking up,” said Audrey to herself.  “It were easier to die.  Perhaps I am dying.”

“And then out he walks to find and talk to you, and in sets your pretty summer of all play and no work!” went on the other, in a high voice.  “Oh, there was kindness enough, once you had caught his fancy!  I wonder if the lady at Westover praised his kindness?  They say she is a proud young lady:  I wonder if she liked your being at the ball last night?  When she comes to Fair View, I’ll take my oath that you’ll walk no more in its garden!  But perhaps she won’t come now,—­though her maid Chloe told Mistress Bray’s Martha that she certainly loves him”—­

“I wish I were dead,” said Audrey.  “I wish I were dead, like Molly.”  She stood up straight against the wall, and pushed her heavy hair from her forehead.  “Be quiet now,” she said.  “You see that I am awake; there is no need for further calling.  I shall not dream again.”  She looked at the older woman doubtfully.  “Would you mind,” she suggested,—­“would you be so very kind as to leave me alone, to sit here awake for a while?  I have to get used to it, you know.  To-morrow, when we go back to the glebe house, I will work the harder.  It must be easy to work when one is awake.  Dreaming takes so much time.”

Mistress Deborah could hardly have told why she did as she was asked.  Perhaps the very strangeness of the girl made her uncomfortable in her presence; perhaps in her sour and withered heart there was yet some little soundness of pity and comprehension; or perhaps it was only that she had said her say, and was anxious to get to her friends below, and shake from her soul the dust of any possible complicity with circumstance in moulding the destinies of Darden’s Audrey.  Be that as it may, when she had flung her hood upon the bed and had looked at herself in the cracked glass above the dresser, she went out of the room, and closed the door somewhat softly behind her.

CHAPTER XXII

BY THE RIVERSIDE

“Yea, I am glad—­I and my father and mother and Ephraim—­that thee is returned to Fair View,” answered Truelove.  “And has thee truly no shoes of plain and sober stuffs?  These be much too gaudy.”

“There’s a pair of black callimanco,” said the storekeeper reluctantly; “but these of flowered silk would so become your feet, or this red-heeled pair with the buckles, or this of fine morocco.  Did you think of me every day that I spent in Williamsburgh?”