“You needn’t distress yourself, Tom.  I don’t know that I shall go there again,” said Betty indifferently.

“I wouldn’t if I were you.”  He was charmed to find her so reasonable.  “You know it isn’t the thing for a young girl to call on a man, you’ll get yourself talked about in a way you won’t like—­take my word for it!  If you want to be kind and neighborly send one of the boys over to ask how he is—­or bake a cake with your own hands, but you keep away.  That’s the idea! —­send him something to eat, something you’ve made yourself, he’ll appreciate that.”

“I’m afraid he couldn’t eat it if I did, Tom.  It’s plain you have no acquaintance with my cooking,” said Betty, laughing.

“Did Norton say if he had any idea as to the identity of the men who robbed him?” inquired Tom casually.

“Their object wasn’t robbery,” said Betty.

“No?” Ware’s glance was uneasy.

“It seems that some one objects to his coming here, Tom—­here to Belle Plain to see me, I suppose,” added Betty.  The planter moved uncomfortably in his seat, refusing to meet her eyes.

“He shouldn’t put out a yarn like that, Bet.  It isn’t just the thing for a gentleman to do—­”

“He isn’t putting it out, as you call it!  He has told no one, so far as I know,” said Betty quickly.  Mr. Ware fell into a brooding silence.  “Of course, Charley wouldn’t mention my name in any such connection!” continued Betty.

“Who cares how often he comes here?  You don’t, and I don’t.  There’s more back of this than Charley would want you to know.  I reckon he’s got his enemies; some one’s had a grudge against him and taken this way to settle it.”  The planter’s tone and manner were charged with an unpleasant significance.

“I don’t like your hints, Tom,” said Betty.  Her heightened color and the light in her eyes warned Tom that he had said enough.  In some haste he finished his second cup of tea, a beverage which he despised, and after a desultory remark or two, withdrew to his office.

Betty went up-stairs to her own room, where she tried to finish a letter she had begun the day before to Judith Ferris, but she was in no mood for this.  She was owning to a sense of utter depression and she had been at home less than a month.  Struggle as she might against the feeling, it was borne in upon her that she was wretchedly lonely.  She had seated herself by an open window.  Now, resting her elbows on the ledge and with her chin between her palms, she gazed off into the still night.  A mile distant, on what was called “Shanty Hill,” were the quarters of the slaves.  The only lights she saw were there, the only sounds she heard reached her across the intervening fields.  This was her world.  A half-savage world with its uncouth army of black dependents.