se stiffly, her little lily face all aflame.

"My father saith much evil cometh of this--it is sin--he ought not to
have married her; and--and--it is very wrong of you to be telling me
this--" she stammered angrily, with her little hands clasped tight
across the white stomacher.

"Very unfit," comes from that young gentleman of the cloth.

We were all three standing, and I make no doubt my own face went as red
as theirs, for the taunt bit home. That inference of evil where no
evil was, made an angrier man than was my wont. The two moved towards
the door. I put myself across their way.

"Rebecca, you do yourself wrong! You are measuring other people's
deeds with too short a yardstick, little woman, and the wrong is in
your own mind, not theirs."

"I--I--don't know what you mean!" cried Rebecca obstinately, with a
break in her voice that ought to have warned; but her next words
provoked afresh. "It was wicked!--it was sinful!"--with an angry
stamp--"it was shameful of Jack Battle to marry an Indian girl----"

There I cut in.

"Was it?" I asked. "Young woman, let me tell you a bald truth! When a
white man marries an Indian, the union is as honourable as your own
would be. It is when the white man does _not_ marry the Indian that
there is shame; and the shame is to the white man, not the Indian----!"

Sure, one might let an innocent bundle of swans' down and baby cheeks
have its foibles without laying rough hands upon them!

The next,--little Rebecca cries out that I've insulted her, is in
floods of tears, and marches off on the young gentleman's arm.

Comes a clatter of slippered heels on the hall floor and in bustles my
Lady Kirke, bejewelled and befrilled and beflounced till I had thought
no mortal might bend in such massive casings of starch.

"La," she pants, "good lack!--Wellaway! My fine savage! Welladay!
What a pretty mischief have you been working? Proposals are amaking at
the foot of the stairs. O--lud! The preacher was akissing that little
Puritan maid as I came by! Good lack, what will Sir John say?"

And my lady laughs and laughs till I look to see the tears stain the
rouge of her cheeks.

"O-lud," she laughs, "I'm like to die! He tried to kiss the baggage!
And the little saint jumps back so quick that he hit her ear by
mistake! La," she laughs, "I'm like to die!"

I'd a mind to tell her ladyship that a loosening of her stays might
prolong life, but I didn't. Instead, I delivere