back."

"Not never no more?" sobbed Clarinda, for she was weak-minded, and
could not bear to think that Bony never, never let naughty people go
home again.

Next day Jane had heard more.

"He has taken her to a Green?"

"A Goose Green?" asked Clarinda.

"No. A Gretna Green. Don't ask so many questions, child," said Jane;
who, having no more to tell, gave herself airs.

Jane was wrong on one point. Miss Jessamine's niece did come back, and
she and her husband were forgiven. The Grey Goose remembered it well,
it was Michaelmastide, the Michaelmas before the Michaelmas before the
Michaelmas--but ga, ga! What does the date matter? It was autumn,
harvest-time, and everybody was so busy prophesying and praying about
the crops, that the young couple wandered through the lanes, and got
blackberries for Miss Jessamine's celebrated crab and blackberry jam,
and made guys of themselves with bryony-wreaths, and not a soul
troubled his head about them, except the children, and the Postman.
The children dogged the Black Captain's footsteps (his bubble
reputation as an Ogre having burst), clamoring for a ride on the black
mare. And the Postman would go somewhat out of his postal way to catch
the Captain's dark eye, and show that he had not forgotten how to
salute an officer.

But they were "trying times." One afternoon the black mare was
stepping gently up and down the grass, with her head at her master's
shoulder, and as many children crowded on to her silky back as if she
had been an elephant in a menagerie; and the next afternoon she
carried him away, sword and _sabre-tache_ clattering war-music at her
side, and the old Postman waiting for them, rigid with salutation, at
the four cross roads.

War and bad times! It was a hard winter, and the big Miss Jessamine
and the little Miss Jessamine (but she was Mrs. Black-Captain now),
lived very economically that they might help their poorer neighbors.
They neither entertained nor went into company, but the young lady
always went up the village as far as the _George and Dragon_, for air
and exercise, when the London Mail[2] came in.

[Footnote 2: The Mail Coach it was that distributed over the face of
the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking
news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo.... The
grandest chapter of our experience, within the whole Mail Coach
service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the
news of Vict