Now, Dorothy, don’t be bashful.  Here’s your sister and your cousin and your aunt waiting for the horrifying revelation.  What has happened?”

“I’ll tell you what is going to happen, Kate,” said the girl, smiling at the way the other ran on.  “Mrs. Captain Kempt will perhaps consent to take you and me to New York or Boston, where we will put up at the best hotel, and trick ourselves out in ball costumes that will be the envy of Bar Harbor.  I shall pay the expense of this trip as partial return for your father’s kindness in getting me an invitation and your mother’s kindness in allowing me to be one of your party.”

“Oh, then it isn’t an elopement, but a legacy.  Has the wicked but wealthy relative died?”

“Yes,” said Dorothy solemnly, her eyes on the floor.

“Oh, I am so sorry for what I have just said!”

“You always speak without thinking,” chided her mother.

“Yes, don’t I?  But, you see, I thought somehow that Dorothy had no relatives; but if she had one who was wealthy, and who allowed her to slave at sewing, then I say he was wicked, dead or alive, so there!”

“When work is paid for it is not slavery,” commented Sabina with severity and justice.

The sewing girl looked up at her.

“My grandfather, in Virginia, owned slaves before the war, and I have often thought that any curse which may have been attached to slavery has at least partly been expiated by me, as foreshadowed in the Bible, where it says that the sins of the fathers shall affect the third or fourth generations.  I was thinking of that when I spoke of the shackles falling from my wrists, for sometimes, Miss Kempt, you have made me doubt whether wages and slavery are as incompatible as you appear to imagine.  My father, who was a clergyman, often spoke to me of his father’s slaves, and while he never defended the institution, I think the past in his mind was softened by a glamor that possibly obscured the defects of life on the plantation.  But often in depression and loneliness I have thought I would rather have been one of my grandfather’s slaves than endure the life I have been called upon to lead.”

“Oh, Dorothy, don’t talk like that, or you’ll make me cry,” pleaded Kate.  “Let us be cheerful whatever happens.  Tell us about the money.  Begin ‘Once upon a time,’ and then everything will be all right.  No matter how harrowing such a story begins, it always ends with lashin’s and lashin’s of money, or else with a prince in a gorgeous uniform and gold lace, and you get the half of his kingdom.  Do go on.”

Dorothy looked up at her impatient friend, and a radiant cheerfulness chased away the gathering shadows from her face.