She fairly wrung her hands in her helpless wrath, and the gems glittered anew.  “But, but,” she stammered out, “know you the full result of this, Harry Wingfield?  She, my sister Mary, thinks that I—­I—­sent to England for the goods for her; she knows that I have some acquaintance with what she hath done, and she—­she is blessing me for it, and I cannot deny what she thinks.  I—­I—­cannot tell her what you, you have done, lest, lest—­” To my great astonishment she stopped short with such a flame of blushes as I had never seen on her face before, and I was at a loss to know what she might mean, but supposed that she considered that the shame of Mistress Mary’s wearing finery which had been paid for out of a convict’s purse would be more than she could put upon her, and yet that she dared not inform her, lest she refuse to wear the sky-blue robe to the governor’s ball, and so anger Madam Cavendish.

“Madam,” I said, “your sister is but blessing you for what you would have done, and wherefore need you fret?”

“God knows I would,” she broke out, passionately.  “Every jewel I possess, the very gown from my back, would I have sold to save her this, had I but known.  Why did she not tell me, why did not she tell me?  Oh, Harry, I pray you to take these jewels.”

“I cannot take them, madam,” I said.  Yet such was her distress I was sorry for her, though I believed it to be rooted and grounded in falsity, and that she had no need to regard with such disapprobation her sister’s being indebted to an English gentleman who gave her in all honour the best he had.  Yet could I not yield and take those jewels, for more reasons than one; not only should I have lost the dear delight of having served Mary Cavendish, but I had a memory of wrong which would not suffer me to touch those rings, nor to allow that innocent maid to be benefited by them, since I cannot say what dark suspicions seized me when I looked at them.

“My God!” she said, “was ever such a web of falsehood as this?  Here must I hear my sister’s blessings upon me for what I have done, and I knowing all the time that ’twas you, and yet she must not know.”  Then again that flame of red overspread her face and neck to the meet of her muslin kerchief, and I knew not why.

“Madam,” I said, “one deception opens the way for a whole flock,” and I spoke with something of a double meaning, but she only cried out, with apparently no understanding of it, that things had come to a cruel pass, and back to the house she went; and I presently followed her to get my gun, having a mind to shoot a few wild fowl, since my pupil was at her wheel.  And there the two sat, keeping up that gentle drone of industry which I have come to think of as a note of womanhood, like the hum of a bee or the purr of a cat or the call of a bird.  They sat erect, the delicate napes of their necks showing above their muslin kerchiefs under their high twists of hair, for even Mary had her golden curls caught up that morning on account of the flax-lint, and from their fair, attentive faces nobody would have gathered what stress of mind both were in.  Of a surety there must be a quieting and calming power in some of the feminine industries which be a boon to the soul.