quality. Polly Ann gave back in a kind of dismay, and I shivered.

"Yes," I answered, "I am David Ritchie."

"You--you dare to judge me!" she cried.

I knew not why she said this.

"To judge you?" I repeated.

"Yes, to judge me," she answered. "I know you, David Ritchie, and the
blood that runs in you. Your mother was a foolish--saint" (she laughed),
"who lifted her eyebrows when I married her brother, John Temple. That
was her condemnation of me, and it stung me more than had a thousand
sermons. A doting saint, because she followed your father into the
mountain wilds to her death for a whim of his. And your father. A
Calvinist fanatic who had no mercy on sin, save for that particular
weakness of his own--"

"Stop, Mrs. Temple!" I cried, lifting up in bed. And to my astonishment
she was silenced, looking at me in amazement. "You had your vengeance
when I came to you, when you turned from me with a lift of your
shoulders at the news of my father's death. And now--"

"And now?" she repeated questioningly.

"Now I thought you were changed," I said slowly, for the excitement was
telling on me.

"You listened!" she said.

"I pitied you."

"Oh, pity!" she cried. "My God, that you should pity me!" She
straightened, and summoned all the spirit that was in her. "I would
rather be called a name than have the pity of you and yours."

"You cannot change it, Mrs. Temple," I answered, and fell back on the
nettle-bark sheets. "You cannot change it," I heard myself repeating,
as though it were another's voice. And I knew that Polly Ann was bending
over me and calling me.

* * * * * * *

"Where did they go, Polly Ann?" I asked.

"Acrost the Mississippi, to the lands of the Spanish King," said Polly
Ann.

"And where in those dominions?" I demanded.

"John Saunders took 'em as far as the Falls," Polly Ann answered. "He
'lowed they was goin' to St. Louis. But they never said a word. I reckon
they'll be hunted as long as they live."

I had thought of them much as I lay on my back recovering from the
fever,--the fever for which Mrs. Temple was to blame. Yet I bore her
no malice. And many other thoughts I had, probing back into childhood
memories for the solving of problems there.

"I knowed ye come of gentlefolks, Davy," Polly Ann had said when we
talked together.

So I was first cousin to Nick, and nephew to that selfish gentleman, Mr.
Temple, in whose affectionate care I had been left in Charlestown by my
fath