a said, "and give your faith a single straw
to cling to."

Van Dorn's hand slipped around her waist, and his florid cheeks and blue
eyes bent beneath her Leghorn hat:

"I find it here, perhaps, Hulda. Shall I embrace your youth with my
strong passion? I fear I love you."

"Yes," she answered, looking up with her long-lashed eyes of such
entrancing gray; "kiss me if it will give you hope!"

The blush and high color went out of his face as he stared into those
passive, large gray orbs, wide open beneath his pouting, rich,
effeminate lips, and, as he hesitated, Hulda repeated:

"Kiss me, if it will make you hope!"

"No, no," he answered; "of all places I am most hopeless _there_."

"I knew you would not kiss me," Hulda said, with a tone above him, "if I
gave you the right for any pure object. The kiss _you_ would give me
does not see its mate in my soul."

"You hate me, then?" said Van Dorn.

"No, I pity you; I pray for you, too."

"For me? What interest have you in me?"

"I do not know," said Hulda. "I have often wondered what made me think
of you so often and, yet, never with admiration. You are the only person
here who appears to have lost something by being here; some portion of
you seems to have disappeared; I have felt that you might have been a
gentleman, though you can never be again. I shrink from you, and still I
pity you. But, with all your handsome ways, I would never love you,
while the poor boy who is riding with us I loved as soon as he came."

"_Chis! chito!_ You can shrink from me and not from a Cannon, too? Why,
girl, you have put him in my power."

"I have been in your power for a long time, Captain Van Dorn, and you
have looked at me with bold and evil eyes many a time, but never came
nearer. When I gaze at you as I did just now, you fly from me. That boy
I love is as safe as I am, in your hands."

"Why, dear presumer? Tell me."

"Because I love him, and you require my pity. As long as you protect
that poor orphan boy I shall carry your name to God for pardon; if you
ever do him harm, my prayers for you will be dumb forever."

"_Oh! ayme! ayme!_" softly laughed Van Dorn, his blush not coming now;
"you forget, Hulda, that I believe in nothing."

They had hardly gone four miles when a little, low-pitched town of small
square houses, strewn about like toy-blocks between pairs of red outside
chimneys, sat, in the soft, humid October morning, along the rim of a
marshy creek that, skirtin