t work
together. Tell me, did you succeed in quieting General Harrington's
inquiries regarding the letters of recommendation?"

"Did I succeed?" answered Agnes, with a smile that crept over her young
lips like a viper. "The old General is more pliable than the son. Oh,
yes, when he began questioning me of the whereabouts of our kind friends
who think so much of us, you know, I put forth all the accomplishments
you have taught me, and wiled him from the subject in no time. You have
just questioned my beauty, mammy. I doubt if he did then, for his eyes
were not off my face a moment. What fine eyes the old gentleman has,
though! I think it would be easier to obey you in that quarter than the
other."

As she uttered the last words with a reckless lift of the head, the
slave-woman made a spring at her, and grasping the scornfully uplifted
shoulder, bent her face--which was that of a fiend--close to the young
girl's ear: "Beware, girl, beware!" she whispered, "you are treading
among adders."

"I think you are crazy," was the contemptuous reply, as Agnes released
her shoulder from the gripe of that fierce hand. "My shoulder will be
black and blue after this, and all for a joke about a conceited old
gentleman whom we are both taking in. Did you not tell me to delude him
off the subject if he mentioned those letters of recommendation again?"

The woman did not answer, but stood bending forward as if ashamed of her
violence, but yet with a gleam of rage lingering in her black eyes.

"Have you done?" said Agnes, arranging her velvet sacque, which had been
torn from its buttons in front, by the rude handling she had received.

"You must not speak in that way again," answered the old woman in a low
voice, "I did not mean to hurt you, child, but General Harrington is not
a man for girls like you to joke about."

"This is consistent, upon my word," answered the girl with a short
scornful laugh. "You teach me to delude the old gentleman into a
half-flirtation. He meets me in the grounds--begins to ask about the
persons from whom we obtained those precious recommendations, and when I
attempt to escape the subject, persists in walking by me till I led him
a merry dance up the steepest hill that could be found, and left him
there out of breath, and in the midst of a protestation that I was the
loveliest person he had ever seen. Loveliest--no, that was not it--the
most bewitching creature! these were the last words I remember, for t