ra may possibly make
you laugh, my reader, but the good, ropy brown man was doing his best to
console his little friend; and as Mara looked at him he was almost
glorified in her eyes--he had power to save Moses, and he would do it.
She went home to dinner that day with her heart considerably lightened.
She refrained, in a guilty way, from even looking at Moses, who was
gloomy and moody.

Mara had from nature a good endowment of that kind of innocent hypocrisy
which is needed as a staple in the lives of women who bridge a thousand
awful chasms with smiling, unconscious looks, and walk, singing and
scattering flowers, over abysses of fear, while their hearts are dying
within them.

She talked more volubly than was her wont with Mrs. Pennel, and with her
old grandfather; she laughed and seemed in more than usual spirits, and
only once did she look up and catch the gloomy eye of Moses. It had that
murky, troubled look that one may see in the eye of a boy when those
evil waters which cast up mire and dirt have once been stirred in his
soul. They fell under her clear glance, and he made a rapid, impatient
movement, as if it hurt him to be looked at. The evil spirit in boy or
man cannot bear the "touch of celestial temper;" and the sensitiveness
to eyebeams is one of the earliest signs of conscious, inward guilt.

Mara was relieved, as he flung out of the house after dinner, to see the
long, dry figure of Captain Kittridge coming up and seizing Moses by the
button. From the window she saw the Captain assuming a confidential air
with him; and when they had talked together a few moments, she saw Moses
going with great readiness after him down the road to his house.

In less than a fortnight, it was settled Moses was to sail for China,
and Mara was deep in the preparations for his outfit. Once she would
have felt this departure as the most dreadful trial of her life. Now it
seemed to her a deliverance for him, and she worked with a cheerful
alacrity, which seemed to Moses more than was proper, considering _he_
was going away.

For Moses, like many others of his sex, boy or man, had quietly settled
in his own mind that the whole love of Mara's heart was to be his, to
have and to hold, to use and to draw on, when and as he liked. He
reckoned on it as a sort of inexhaustible, uncounted treasure that was
his own peculiar right and property, and therefore he felt abused at
what he supposed was a disclosure of some deficiency on h