aesar still reigned. Caesar's head
was as white and tight-curled as the fleece of a pet lamb. He was now
a shining light in the Methodist meeting; but he had not yet broken
himself of his oaths. "Damn--bress de Lord" was still heard on occasion:
but everybody, even Nan, had grown so used to it that it did not pass
for an oath; and, no doubt, even the recording angel had long since
ceased to put it down. James Little and his wife were now as much a part
of the family as if they had had the old Squire's blood in their veins;
and nobody thought about the old time of their disgrace,--nobody but Jim
and Sally themselves. From their thoughts it was never absent, when they
looked on the beautiful, joyous face of Raby. He had grown beyond his
years, and looked like a boy of twelve. He was manly, frank, impulsive;
a child after Hetty's own heart, and much more like her than he was like
his father or his mother. It was a question, also, if he did not love
her more than he loved either of his parents: all his hours with her
were unclouded; over his intercourse with them, there always hung the
undefined cloud of an unexpressed sadness.

Hetty was changed. Her hair was gray; her fair skin weather-beaten; and
the fine wrinkles around the corners of her merry eyes radiated like the
spokes of a wheel. She had looked young at thirty-seven; she looked
old at forty-five. The phlegmatic and lazy sometimes seem to keep their
youth better than the sanguine and active. It is a cruel thing that
laughter should age a woman's face almost as much as weeping; but it
does. Sunny as Hetty's face was, it had come to have a look older than
it ought, simply because the kindly eyes had so often twinkled and half
closed in merry laughter.

Time had dealt more kindly with Doctor Eben. He was a handsomer man at
forty-one than he had been at thirty-three: the eight years had left no
other trace upon him. Face, figure, step, all were as full of youth
and vigor as upon the day when Hetty first met him walking down
the pine-shaded road. The precise moment when the first pang of
consciousness of the discrepancy between her husband's looks and her own
entered Hetty's mind would be hard to determine. It began probably in
some thoughtless jest of her own, or even of his; for, in his absolute
loyalty of love, his unquestioning and long-established acceptance of
their relation as a perfect one, it would never have crossed Doctor
Eben's mind that Hetty could possibl