“I think you are in love yourself,” I said.

She laughed. “As tall as Saul, as dark, as lordly in all proportions, as gentle as Jonathan, and with a soul like David’s—why shouldn’t I be?” she said. “And he not the equal of the granddaughter of a South Carolina planter! Tell me again, Helena, what has she ever done to prove herself his equal?”

She had had a fancy—Heaven knows why—that her young mother, who had run away with her father, was the daughter of a noble foreign family; or else why should the match have been clandestine? She had had a fancy that she was therefore noble, as her mother was—the mother even whose name her child did not know other than as the slaves had told her the young bridegroom called her Pansy because of a pair of purple-dark eyes. That was about all. That was all the answer I could have made, had I spoken, to her gentle raillery, half mockery, in which she did not quite believe herself. But even were it so, and the daughter noble as the mother, could blood that had filtered through generations of oppressors lounging in laps of luxury be pure as this blood that had informed none but simple and innocent lives, and seemed just now as if it had come fresh from the hands of the Maker? I surveyed him from behind the hand-screen that failed to keep the ruddy flames from my face, and I felt him in that glance to be one of the sons of God, and I but one of the daughters of men. Again I did not tell Mrs. Montresor.

But the witch could always read my thoughts. “Still,” she said, “he has kept a tavern. There is no getting round that fact by all the poetry in the world. Then why try to get round it? He has furnished food and shelter to the tired and roofless—as noble a way to make money, surely, as working the bones and muscles of slaves, and accepting the gold they earn.”

“That is the last I have of such gold,” I cried, in a stifled way; and I unclasped the old bracelet on my wrist and tossed it behind the back-log—people were too gaily engaged to observe us at the moment. “I think,” I said then, turning upon her, “that you are employed as an advocate, unless—you are really weary of me.”

“Weary of you!” she exclaimed, half under her breath though it was—“weary of you, when you are such unceasing variety to me that if you married ten thousand tavern-keepers I should always have a room in the inn!”

“Thank Heaven,” I answered her gaily, “it is an impossibility that I should ever marry one.” And then there was a lull in the laughter and the snatches of song and conversation on the other side of the room; and while I was still gazing after my bracelet and into the chimney-place, where the flames wallowed about unhewn forest logs that took two men to cast to them, Colonel Vorse came over to us.

“You will turn into salamanders,” he said.

“It is bad enough to be in hot water,” said Mrs. Montresort lightly. “I will leave the fire to you and Helena.”

“Where you sit,” said Colonel Vorse then to me, “if you turn your head slightly to the left, and shade your eyes, you can see the side of the darkest and sternest of our mountains. You know we do not call our hills by the names they have in maps and Government surveys; the old settlers who first came here called this one, for unknown reasons of their own, the Mount of Sorrow. It has always been the Mount of Sorrow.”

“An ominous name for so near a neighbour,” I said.

“Ah! you think this region is oppressive, or perhaps dull and tame, without life or stir—desolate, in fact. What if I should tell you that it bubbles, like a caldron over the bottomless pit, with griefs and sins!—that in lives condemned to perpetual imprisonment on these bare rocks, feeding on themselves, traits intensifying the loneliness, the labour, the negation, slowly extract the juices of humanity, and make crime a matter to be whispered of among them? If they feel they are forgotten by God, what matters