f you remain here, you
will be another Patty Cannon or go to jail. There! Look at it
conservatively: warmth, riches, pleasure, attention, change, dress to
become you, a watch and jewels, against villainy and lowness of every
kind."

"How are you to be repaid for this?"

"By your love."

"But it is not mine to give; Levin has it."

"Pooh! that's beneath you."

"But it is gone; I cannot get it back; it will not come."

"Give me yourself," McLane said, drawing her towards him; "the
refinements I do not care about. Be mine!"

The girl allowed herself to be brought nearly to his side, and, as he
bent to kiss her with his large, complacent lips, she glided from his
hands.

"I could never stoop," said Hulda, "to be even the wife of a negro
dealer."

He colored to the eyes, yet with admiration of her almost aristocratic
composure.

"You could not stoop to me?" he said "Not from your father's gallows?"

"No; he was a robber, but a bold one. You only receive the goods."

She was gone; and he stood, with evil lights in his face, but no shame.
He drank some brandy from a flask, and murmured, "Now I have an insult
to revenge, as well as a fancy to be gratified; her father must have
been a cool rogue. Well, everything has to be done by force here; Patty
Cannon shall see my gold."

CHAPTER XLI.

AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK.

Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret,
a room Van Dorn usually slept in. With her emotions profoundly excited,
though she had not revealed them--her modesty having received a stab
that now brought bitter tears to her eyes, and blushes, unseen except by
the angels, whose white wings had hidden them from her tempter--Vesta
fled into this room to deliberate upon her dire extremity.

Three persons only were now in the house, each one an interested party
in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of
cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of
mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something
inconsequential and merry and heartless.

"Perhaps I can fly to our old house across the State Line, and take
refuge with the new tenant there," Hulda thought. "Oh! I wish Van Dorn
was here; he is so brave; and when he left me his kiss was like my
father's."

Chains clanked, and the drone of low hymns came down the hatchway from
the slave-pen.

"There is a white man up there," Hulda reflected; "dare I go up