ory, and
a truthful one, so far as it went.

The colonel raged at first, but rage soon subsided into anger, and anger
moderated into annoyance, and annoyance into a sort of garrulous sense
of injury. The colonel thought he had been hardly used; he had trusted
this negro, and he had broken faith. Yet, after all, he did not blame
Grandison so much as he did the abolitionists, who were undoubtedly at
the bottom of it.

As for Charity Lomax, Dick told her, privately of course, that he had
run his father's man, Grandison, off to Canada, and left him there.

"Oh, Dick," she had said with shuddering alarm, "what have you done? If
they knew it they 'd send you to the penitentiary, like they did that
Yankee."

"But they don't know it," he had replied seriously; adding, with an
injured tone, "you don't seem to appreciate my heroism like you did that
of the Yankee; perhaps it 's because I was n't caught and sent to the
penitentiary. I thought you wanted me to do it."

"Why, Dick Owens!" she exclaimed. "You know I never dreamed of any such
outrageous proceeding.

"But I presume I 'll have to marry you," she concluded, after some
insistence on Dick's part, "if only to take care of you. You are too
reckless for anything; and a man who goes chasing all over the North,
being entertained by New York and Boston society and having negroes to
throw away, needs some one to look after him."

"It 's a most remarkable thing," replied Dick fervently, "that your
views correspond exactly with my profoundest convictions. It proves
beyond question that we were made for one another."

* * * * *

They were married three weeks later. As each of them had just returned
from a journey, they spent their honeymoon at home.

A week after the wedding they were seated, one afternoon, on the piazza
of the colonel's house, where Dick had taken his bride, when a negro
from the yard ran down the lane and threw open the big gate for the
colonel's buggy to enter. The colonel was not alone. Beside him, ragged
and travel-stained, bowed with weariness, and upon his face a haggard
look that told of hardship and privation, sat the lost Grandison.

The colonel alighted at the steps.

"Take the lines, Tom," he said to the man who had opened the gate, "and
drive round to the barn. Help Grandison down,--poor devil, he 's so
stiff he can hardly move!--and get a tub of water and wash him and rub
him down, and feed him, and give hi