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"Roland,--cousin,--brother!--what is it that disturbs you? Will you not
ride forward, and salute the good people that are making us welcome?"

"Us!" muttered the young man, with a bitter voice; "who is there on
earth, Edith, to welcome us? Where shall _we_ look for the friends and
kinsfolk, that the meanest of the company are finding among yonder noisy
barbarians?"

"You do them injustice, Roland," said the maiden. "Yesternight we had
experience at the Station we left, that these wild people of the woods do
not confine their welcomes to kinsmen. Kinder and more hospitable people
do not exist in the world."

"It is not that, Edith," said the young man; "I were but a brute to doubt
their hospitality. But look, Edith; we are in Kentucky, almost at our
place of refuge. Yonder hovels, lowly, mean, and wretched--are they the
mansions that should shelter the child of my father's brother? Yonder
people, the outcasts of our borders, the poor, the rude, the savage--but
one degree elevated above the Indians, with whom they contend,--are they
the society from whom Edith Forrester should choose her friends?"

"They are," said Edith, firmly; "and Edith Forrester asks none better.
In such a cabin as these, and, if need be, in one still more humble,
she is content to pass her life, and dream that she is still in the
house of her fathers. From such people, too, she will choose her friends,
knowing that, even among the humblest of them, there are many worthy of
her regard and affection. What have we to mourn in the world we have
left behind us? We are the last of our name and race; fortune has left
us nothing to regret. My only relative on earth, saving yourself,
Roland,--saving yourself, my cousin, my brother,"--her lip quivered, and,
for a moment her eyes were filled with tears,--"my only other living
relation resides in this wilderness-land; and she, tenderly nurtured as
myself, finds in it enough to engage her thoughts and secure her
happiness. Why, then, should not I? Why should not _you_? Trust me, dear
Roland, I should myself be as happy as the day is long, could I only know
that you did not grieve for me."

"I cannot but choose it," said Roland. "It is to me you owe the loss of
fortune and your present banishment from the world."

"Say not so, Roland, for it is not true; no! I never can believe that our
poor uncle would have carried his resentment, for such a cause, so far.
But supposing that he could, and granting that