n and tobacco,
you must have both; you've got money, we must have that. What we don't
sell to you we'll send to England."

All at the table had listened absorbedly to this strange revelation, and
Jack rose from the table shocked and discouraged.

Olympia seated herself at the piano, and, slipping out, as he supposed,
unseen, Jack strolled off into the fragrant alleys of oleander and
laurel. Dick, however, was at his heels. The two continued on in
silence, Dick trolling along, switching the bugs from the pink blossoms
that filled the air with an enervating odor.

"I say. Jack, I've found out something."

"What have you found out, you young conspirator?"

"Wesley Boone's trying to get the negroes to help him off."

"The devil he is!"

"Yes. Last night I was down in the rose-fields. Young Clem, Aunt
Penelope's boy, was sitting under a bush talking with a crony. I heard
him say, 'De cap'n'll take you, too, ef you doan say noffin'. He guv
Pompey ten gold dollars.'

"'De Lor'! Will he take ev'ybody 'long, too, Clem?'

"'Good Lor', no! He's goin' to get his army, and den he'll come an'
fetch all de niggahs.'

"'De Lor'!'

"Trying to get closer, I made a rustling of the bushes, and the young
imps shot through them like weasles before I could lay hands on them.
Now, what do you think of that?"

"If it is only to escape, all right; but if it is an attempt to stir up
insurrection, I will stop Wesley myself, rather than let him carry
it out!"

"Wouldn't it be the best thing to warn Vincent? It would be a dreadful
thing to let him go and leave his poor mother and sister here
unprotected."

"Let me think it over. I will hit on some plan to keep Wesley from
making an ingrate of himself without bringing danger on our
benefactors."

Kate was dawdling on the lawn as the two returned to the house. Jack
challenged her to a jaunt.

"Where shall it be?" she asked, readily, moving toward him. "The garden
of the gods?"

"The garden of the goddesses, you mean, if it is the rose-field."

"That's true; a god's garden would be filled with thorns and warlike
blossoms."

"I don't know; a rose-garden grew the wars of the houses of York and
Lancaster."

"Do you remember the scene in Shakespeare where Bolingbroke and Gaunt
pluck the roses?"

"Quite well. There is always something pathetic to me in the fables
historians invent to excuse or palliate, or, perhaps it would be juster
to say, make tolerable, the stained pages o