thing
I could do, and might work upon her feelings--as it has on mine. Don't
you?

"J. C."

Miss Sally felt the tendrils of her fair hair stir with consternation.
The letter had arrived a week ago; perhaps he was in Pineville at that
very moment! She must go at once to the Jeffcourts,--it was only a mile
distant. Perhaps she might be still in time; but even then it was a
terribly short notice for such a meeting. Yet she stopped to select her
newest hat from the closet, and to tie it with the largest of bows under
her pretty chin; and then skipped from the veranda into a green lane
that ran beside the garden boundary. There, hidden by a hedge, she
dropped into a long, swinging trot, that even in her haste still kept
the languid deliberation characteristic of her people, until she had
reached the road. Two or three hounds in the garden started joyously
to follow her, but she drove them back with a portentous frown, and an
ill-aimed stone, and a suppressed voice. Yet in that backward glance she
could see that her little Eumenides--Mammy Judy's children--were peering
at her from below the wooden floor of the portico, which they were
grasping with outstretched arms and bowed shoulders, as if they were
black caryatides supporting--as indeed their race had done for many a
year--the pre-doomed and decaying mansion of their master.

CHAPTER III.

Happily Miss Sally thought more of her present mission than of the
past errors of her people. The faster she walked the more vividly she
pictured the possible complications of this meeting. She knew the dull,
mean nature of her aunt, and the utter hopelessness of all appeal to
anything but her selfish cupidity, and saw in this fatuous essay of
Corbin only an aggravation of her worst instincts. Even the dead body
of her son would not only whet her appetite for pecuniary vengeance,
but give it plausibility in the eyes of their emotional but ignorant
neighbors. She had still less to hope from Julia Jeffcourt's more honest
and human indignation but equally bigoted and prejudiced intelligence.
It is true they were only women, and she ought to have no fear of that
physical revenge which Julia had spoken of, but she reflected that Miss
Jeffcourt's unmistakable beauty, and what was believed to be a "truly
Southern spirit," had gained her many admirers who might easily take
her wrongs upon their shoulders. If her father had only given her that
letter before, she might have stopped Co