r of them so merciless as
to Ruth. Although he knows that she loves Master Scammon--in spite of his
desertion and would rather die than wed another, he has promised her to
Mogg Megone, the chief who rules the Indians at the Saco mouth. He,
blundering savage, fancies that he sees to the bottom of her grief, and
one day, while urging his suit, he opens his blanket and shows the scalp
of Scammon, to prove that he has avenged her. She looks in horror, but
when he flings the bloody trophy at her feet she baptizes it with a
forgiving tear. What villainy may this lead to? Ah, none for him, for
Bonython now steps in and plies him with flattery and drink, gaining from
the chief, at last, his signature--the bow totem--to a transfer of the
land for which he is willing to sell his daughter. Ruth, maddened at her
father's meanness and the Indian's brutality, rushes on the imbruted
savage, grasps from his belt the knife that has slain her lover, cleaves
his heart in twain, and flies into the wood, leaving Bonython stupid with
amazement.

Father Rasles, in his chapel at Norridgewock, is affecting his Indian
converts against the Puritans, who settled to the southward of him fifty
years before. To him comes a woman with torn garments and frightened
face. Her dead mother stood before her last night, she says, and looked
at her reprovingly, for she had killed Mogg Megone. The priest starts
back in wrath, for Mogg was a hopeful agent of the faith, and bids her
go, for she can ask no pardon. Brooding within his chapel, then, he is
startled by the sound of shot and hum of arrows. Harmon and Moulton are
advancing with their men and crying, "Down with the beast of Rome! Death
to the Babylonish dog!" Ruth, knowing not what this new misfortune may
mean, runs from the church and disappears.

Some days later, old Baron Castine, going to Norridgewock to bury and
revenge the dead, finds a woman seated on the earth and gazing over a
field strewn with ashes and with human bones. He touches her. She is
cold. There has been no life for days. It is Ruth.

THE LADY URSULA

In 1690 a stately house stood in Kittery, Maine, a strongly guarded place
with moat and drawbridge (which was raised at night) and a moated grange
adjacent where were cattle, sheep, and horses. Here, in lonely dignity,
lived Lady Ursula, daughter of the lord of Grondale Abbey, across the
water, whose distant grandeurs were in some sort reflected in this manor
of the wilderness