ly,
but I simply can't bear you when you act like this--let me go!"

"Betty, I despair of you ever caring for me!" and as Norton turned
abruptly away he saw Tom Ware appear from about a corner of the house.
"Oh, hang it, there's Tom!"

"You are very nice, anyway, Charley--" said Betty hurriedly, fortified
by the planter's approach.

Ware stalked toward them. Having dined with Betty as recently as the day
before, he contented himself with a nod in her direction. His greeting
to Norton was a more ambitious undertaking; he said he was pleased to
see him; but in so far as facial expression might have indorsed the
statement this pleasure was well disguised, it did not get into his
features. Pausing on the terrace beside them, he indulged in certain
observations on the state of the crops and the weather.

"You've lost a couple of niggers, I hear?" he added with an oblique
glance.

"Yes," said Norton.

"Got on the track of them yet?" Norton shook his head. "I understand
you've a new overseer?" continued Ware, with another oblique glance.

"Then you understand wrong--Carrington's my guest," said Norton. "He's
talking of putting in a crop for himself next season, so he's willing to
help me make mine."

Betty turned quickly at the mention of Carrington's name. She had known
that he was still at Thicket Point, and having heard him spoken of
as Norton's new overseer, had meant to ask Charley if he were really
filling that position. An undefined sense of relief came to her with
Norton's reply to Tom's question.

"Going to turn farmer, is he?" asked Ware.

"So he says." Feeling that the only subjects in which he had ever known
Ware to take the slightest interest, namely, crops and slaves, were
exhausted, Norton was extremely disappointed when the planter manifested
a disposition to play the host and returned to the house with them,
where his mere presence, forbidding and sullen, was such a hardship that
Norton shortly took his leave.

"Well, hang Tom!" he said, as he rode away from Belle Plain. "If he
thinks he can freeze me out there's a long siege ahead of him!"

Issuing from the lane he turned his face in the direction of home, but
he did not urge his horse off a walk. To leave Belle Plain and Betty
demanded always his utmost resolution. His way took him into the solemn
twilight of untouched solitudes. A cool breath rippled through the
depths of the woods and shaped its own soft harmonies where it lifted
the great