mmon and familiar as our hand may, in some
one minute of time, take on a significance and present a face so keen and
strange that it is as if we had never met it before. An Orphan Court!
Again he said the words to himself, and then aloud. No doubt the law did
its best for the fatherless and motherless, for such waifs and strays as
that which lay beside him. When it bound out children, it was most
emphatic that they should be fed and clothed and taught; not starved or
beaten unduly, or let to grow up ignorant as negroes. Sometimes the law
was obeyed, sometimes not.

The roses in the east bloomed again, and the pink of their petals melted
into the clear blue of the upper skies. Because their beauty compelled him
Haward looked at the heavens. The Court of the Orphan!... _When my father
and my mother forsake, me, the Lord taketh me up_. Haward acknowledged
with surprise that portions of the Psalter did somehow stick in the
memory.

The face of the child was dark and thin, but the eyes were large and there
was promise in the mouth. It was a pity--

He looked at her again, and suddenly resolved that he, Marmaduke Haward,
would provide for her future. When they met once more, he should tell the
Governor and his brother adventurers as much; and if they chose to laugh,
why, let them do so! He would take the child to Williamsburgh with him,
and get some woman to tend her until he could find kind and decent folk
with whom to bestow her. There were the new minister of Fair View parish
and his wife,--they might do. He would give them two thousand pounds of
sweet-scented a year for the child's maintenance. Oh, she should be well
cared for! He would--if he thought of it--send her gifts from London; and
when she was grown, and asked in marriage, he would give her for dowry a
hundred acres of land.

As the strengthening rays of the sun, shining alike upon the just and the
unjust, warmed his body, so his own benevolence warmed his heart. He knew
that he was doing a generous thing, and his soul felt in tune with the
beamy light, the caroling of the birds, the freshness and fragrance of the
morning. When at last the child awoke, and, the recollection of the night
coming full upon her, clung to him, weeping and trembling, he put his arm
around her and comforted her with all the pet names his memory could
conjure up.

CHAPTER III

DARDEN'S AUDREY

It was May Day in Virginia, in the year 1727. In England there were George
the