laps of luxury be pure as this
blood that had informed none but simple and innocent lives, and seemed
just now as if it had come fresh from the hands of the Maker? I
surveyed him from behind the hand-screen that failed to keep the ruddy
flames from my face, and if I felt him in that glance to be one of the
sons of God, and I but one of the daughters of men, again I did not
tell Mrs. Montresor.

But the witch could always read my thoughts. "Still," she said, "he
has kept a tavern. There is no getting round that fact by all the
poetry in the world. Then why try to get round it? He has furnished
food and shelter to the tired and roofless--as noble a way to make
money, surely, as working the bones and muscles of slaves, and
accepting the gold they earn."

"That is the last I have of such gold," I cried, in a stifled way; and
I unclasped the old bracelet on my wrist and tossed it behind the
back-log--people were too gayly engaged to observe us at the moment.
"I think," I said then, turning upon her, "that you are employed as an
advocate, unless--you are really weary of me."

"Weary of you!" she exclaimed, half under her breath though it
was--"weary of you, when you are such unceasing variety to me that if
you married ten thousand tavern-keepers I should always have a room in
the inn!"

"Thank Heaven," I answered her, gayly, "it is an impossibility that I
should ever marry _one_." And then there was a lull in the laughter
and the snatches of song and conversation on the other side of the
room; and while I was still gazing after my bracelet and into the
chimney-place, where the flames wallowed about unhewn forest logs that
took two men to cast to them, Colonel Vorse came over to us.

"You will turn into salamanders," he said.

"It is bad enough to be in hot water," said Mrs. Montresor, lightly.
"I will leave the fire to you and Helena."

"Where you sit," said Colonel Vorse then to me, "if you turn your head
slightly to the left, and shade your eyes, you can see the side of the
darkest and sternest of our mountains. You know we do not call our
hills by the names they have in maps and government surveys; the old
settlers who first came here called this one, for unknown reasons of
their own, the Mount of Sorrow. It has always been the Mount of
Sorrow."

"An ominous name for so near a neighbor," I said.

"Ah! you think this region is oppressive, or perhaps dull and tame,
without life or stir--desolate, in fact. What i