ght train, an' I'll be back
Monday morning if I can persuade the old gentleman to come right here
where I can look after him. I reckon there's room in the Harmon house
for both him and me, an' I reckon, if he's got anything particularly
powerful to say in the way of religion, it won't do this little town any
harm to hear it."

He had said all this to Eliza.

"Don't!" she cried in great surprise, but with determined opposition. "I
shall never think you have any sense again if you do such a foolish and
wicked thing."

"Why now, Miss White, as to losing your good opinion, I didn't know as
I'd been fortunate enough to get it yet; and as to its being wicked, I
don't see how you make _that_ out."

"It's meddling with what you have nothing to do with."

"Well now, what will you give me not to go?" He said these words, as he
said most of his words, in a languid, lingering way, but he turned and
faced her with an abrupt glance.

He and she were standing at the head of the first staircase in the
unfurnished corridor. It was the middle of the afternoon; no one chanced
to be passing. He, light-moving, pretty fellow as he was, leaned on the
wall and glanced at her sharply. She stood erect, massive, not only in
her form, but in the strength of will that she opposed to his, and a red
flush slowly mantled her pale, immobile face.

"I don't know what you want of me," she said. "Money's the thing you
love, and I haven't any money; but whether I had or not, I would give
you _nothing_." She turned at the last word.

Then Harkness, taking the chiding and jeers of all his companions
good-naturedly, and giving them precisely the same excuses that he had
given to Eliza, started for Quebec.

What was more remarkable, he actually brought back the old preacher with
him--brought him, or rather led him, to the Harmon house, for the old
man was seemingly quite passive. This was an accomplished fact when
Eliza and Harkness met again.

CHAPTER IX.

The day after his coming, and the next, for some reason the old stranger
called Cameron remained in the brick house to which Harkness had brought
him. The young man, impatient for novelty, if for nothing else, began to
wonder if he had sunk into some stupor of mind from which he would not
emerge. He had heard of him as a preacher, and as the conceptions of
ordinary minds are made up only of the ideas directly presented to them,
he had a vague notion that this old man continually preach