us. We had to turn back without him."

"But with Uncle Dan, of course?"

"Yes, in wedding clothes. And with the overseer and with Phyllis. She'd
tried to run away again, in Saint Louis, but she couldn't do it without
my mother's help, and my mother, though she declared the laws were
shameful, wouldn't break them."

"I'd 've broken them!" whispered Ramsey. "Well, you turned back?"

"Yes, and I saw at once there was something horribly wrong. Day and
night Phyllis was frantic. She hid her feelings from others,
wonderfully, but she poured them out on your uncle Dan. It was then he
suspected how she'd been treating me, and coaxed me to tell him; and
when he told her I'd told him and that he would tell she saw she was at
the end of everything and I thought that now she would whip me to
death."

"Stop! Stop!" The two were again in the pilot-house, but Watson, just
then jingling his engine bells, was too busy to heed anything not "hove
at him." His big bell had sounded for New Carthage, and John Courteney
had appeared down forward of it, but neither Hugh nor Ramsey was enough
diverted to answer the parting hail of the town's two residents joyfully
going ashore. "I can't stand it!" she ran on. "I won't hear it!"

"But I must tell you," murmured Hugh.

"Why must you?"

"Because of what you have already heard and will hear and because you
are you; who you are; what you are."

"Mr. Hugh, I'm the same I was last night when you and your father were
talking poetry and trying to get rid of me!"

"Not quite."

"Well, go on; they quarrelled and you thought your hour had come--it
seems it hadn't. Go on--if you 'must.'"

"I must," he said, and went on. "I had picked up, that day--it was the
third day out and we were down in these bends and had taken on nearly
half a load of cotton--I'd picked up, where your uncle Dan had dropped
it, a small paper box of fusees--you know?--matches that you can't blow
out. Childlike, guiltily, I kept them. In their quarrel, that night,
Phyllis ended by imploring your uncle Dan not to tell on her. I never
knew what supplication was till then. She wept on her knees, clinging to
his. When she had to leave him, to put me to bed, he made her promise
never again to do me the least hurt, and swore that if she did he'd sell
her to the overseer.

"We went. I was afraid that down in the stateroom she'd find the fusees
in my pocket and that I should go to jail as a public thief. But she
stood me in the