Mighty snug was the dining-room that evening, with its oaken sideboard, its prints and portraits on the wall, its sputtering fire, and its well-filled table lighted from a candelabrum in the centre.  The sharp odour of the burning pine was keen to the nostrils, and mingled with it was the smell of the fried ham.  There was the softer fragrance of the corn meal mush or porridge, served with milk, and soft was the taste of it also.  We had sausage cakes, too, and pancakes to be eaten either with butter or with the syrup of the maple-tree; and jam, and jelly, and fruit butter.  These things seem homely fare, no doubt, but there was a skill of cookery in the fat old negress, Hannah—­a skill consisting much in the plentiful use of salt and pepper at proper stages—­that would have given homelier fare a relish to more fastidious tongues.  I miss in the wholesome but limited and unseasoned diet of the English the variety and savouriness of American food (I mean the food of the well-to-do in the large towns), which includes all the English and Scotch dishes, corrected of their insipidity, besides countless dishes French, German, and Dutch, and many native to the soil, all improved and diversified by the surprising genius for cookery which, in so few generations, the negro race has come to exhibit.  I was a busy lad at that meal; a speechless one, consequently, and for some minutes so engrossed in the business of my jaws that I did not heed the unwonted silence of the rest.  Then suddenly it came upon me as something embarrassing and painful that Mr. and Mrs. Faringfield, who usually conversed at meals, had nothing to say, and that Philip Winwood sat gloomy and taciturn, merely going through a hollow form of eating.  As for Fanny, she was the picture of childish sorrow, though now tearless.  Only Madge and little Tom, who had found some joke between themselves, occasionally spluttered with suppressed laughter, smiling meanwhile knowingly at each other.

Of course this depression was due to the absence of Ned, regarding the cause of which his mother was still in the dark.  Not missing him until we children had filed in to supper after tidying up, she had then remarked that he was not yet in.

“He will not be home to supper,” Mr. Faringfield had replied, in a tone that forbade questioning until the pair should be alone, and motioning his wife to be seated at the table.  After that he had once or twice essayed to talk upon casual subjects, as if nothing had happened, but he had perceived that the attempt was hopeless while Mrs. Faringfield remained in her state of deferred curiosity and vague alarm, and so he had desisted.