“Yes, certainly; and we are not likely to suffer.  We Will, then, leave here to-morrow, if you wish, taking the steamer for Berwick Bay.  But why prefer to come upon them unexpectedly?”

Elsie smiled, and blushed slightly.  “You know I never have any concealments from you, papa, and I will be frank about this,” she said.  “I don’t think I apt to be suspicious, and yet the thought has come to me several times within the last few days, that the overseer has had every opportunity to abuse my poor people if he happens to be of a cruel disposition.  And if he is ill-treating them I should like to catch him at it,” she added, her eyes kindling, and the color deepening on her cheek.

“And what would you do in that case?” her lather asked, with a slight smile, drawing her close to him and touching his lips to the blooming cheek.

“Dismiss him, I suppose, papa; I don’t know what else I could do to punish him or prevent further cruelties.  I should not like to shoot him down,” she added, laughingly; “and I doubt if I should have strength to flog him.”

“Doubt?” laughed her father, “certainly you could not, single-handed; unless his politeness should lead him to refrain from any effort to defend himself; and I, it would seem, am not expected to have anything to do with the matter.”

A deeper blush than before now suffused Elsie’s fair cheek.  “Forgive me, dear papa,” she said, laying her head on his shoulder, and fondly stroking his face with her pretty white hand.  “Please consider yourself master there as truly as at the Oaks, and as you have been for years; and understand that your daughter means to take no important step without your entire approval.”

“No, I do not go there as master, but as your guest,” he answered, half playfully, half tenderly.

“My guest?  That seems pleasant indeed, papa; and yet I want you to be master too.  But you will at least advise me?”

“To the best of my ability, my little girl.”

“Thank you, my dear kind father.  I have another reason for wishing to start to-morrow.  I’m growing anxious and impatient to see my birthplace again:  and,” she added low and tenderly, “mamma’s grave.”

“Yes, we will visit it together for the first time; though I have stood there alone again and again, and her baby daughter used to be taken there frequently to scatter flowers over it and play beside it.  Do you remember that?”

“Yes, sir, as an almost forgotten dream, as I do the house and grounds and some of the old servants who petted and humored me.”

While father and daughter conversed thus together in the parlor, a dusky figure sat at a window in the adjoining bedroom, gazing out upon the moonlighted streets and watching the passers-by.  But her thoughts, too, were straying to Viamede; fast-coming memories of earlier days, some all bright and joyous, others filled with the gloom and thick darkness of a terrible anguish, made her by turns long for and dread the arrival at her journey’s end.