ah dragged herself out of the room.

CHAPTER XLI.

OBED ON THE RAMPAGE.

A long illness was the immediate result of so much excitement,
suffering, and grief. Gradually, however, Zillah struggled through
it; and at last, under the genial sky of Southern Italy, she began to
regain her usual health. The kindness of her friends was unfaltering
and incessant. Through this she was saved, and it was Obed's sister
who brought her back from the clutches of fever and the jaws of
death. She had as tender a heart as her brother, and had come to love
as a sister or a daughter this poor, friendless, childlike girl, who
had been thrown upon their hands in so extraordinary a manner.
Brought up in that puritanical school which is perpetually on the
look-out for "special providences," she regarded Zillah's arrival
among them as the most marked special providence which she had ever
known, and never ceased to affirm that something wonderful was
destined to come of all this. Around this faithful, noble-hearted,
puritanical dame, Zillah's affections twined themselves with
something like filial tenderness, and she learned in the course of
her illness to love that simple, straightforward, but high-souled
woman, whose love she had already won. Hitherto she had associated
the practice of chivalrous principles and the grand code of honor
exclusively with lofty gentlemen like the Earl and her father, or
with titled dames; now, however, she learned that here, in Obed
Chute, there was as fine an instinct of honor, as delicate a
sentiment of loyalty to friendship, as refined a spirit of
knight-errantry, as strong a zeal to succor the weak and to become
the champion of the oppressed, and as profound a loathing for all
that is base and mean, as in either of those grand old gentlemen by
whom her character had been moulded. Had Obed Chute been born an
English lord his manners might have had a finer polish, but no
training known among the sons of men could have given him a truer
appreciation of all that is noble and honorable and chivalrous. This
man, whose life had been passed in what Zillah considered as "vulgar
trade," seemed to her to have a nature as pure and as elevated as
that of the Chevalier Bayard, that hero _sans peur et sans reproche_.

Obed, as has already been seen, had a weakness for Neapolitan life,
and felt in his inmost soul that strange fascination which this city
possesses. He had traversed every nook and corner of Naple