land to be
taught in school.

He had brought the child out with him,--a little chap, with marvellously
black eyes and yellow curls, who wore always the costliest of
embroidered coats, which it was plain some woman's hand had embroidered
for him; but whether the child's mother were dead or alive Willan
Blaycke never told, and nobody dared ask.

That the boy needed a mother sadly enough was only too plain. Riding
from county to county on his little white pony by his father's side,
sitting up late at roystering feasts till he nodded in his chair, seeing
all that rough men saw, and hearing all that rough men said, the child
was in a fair way to be ruined outright; and so Willan Blaycke at last
came to see, and one day, in a fit of unwonted conscientiousness and
wisdom, he packed the poor sobbing little fellow off to England in
charge of a trusty escort, and sternly made up his mind that the lad
should not return till he was a man grown. It was only a few months
after this that Jeanne Dubois became Mistress Willan Blaycke; so it
seemed not improbable that the bereaved father's loneliness had had much
to do with that extraordinary step.

Be that as it may, whether he were drunk or sober when he married her,
he treated her as a gentleman should treat his wife, and did his best to
make her a lady. She was always clad in a rich fashion; and a fine show
she made in her scarlet petticoat and white hat with a streaming scarlet
feather in it, riding high on her pillion behind Willan Blaycke on his
great black horse, or sitting up straight and stiff in the swinging
coach with gold on the panels, which he had bought for her in Boston at
a sale of the effects of one of the disgraced and removed governors of
the province of Massachusetts. If there had been any roads to speak of
in those days, Jeanne Dubois would have driven from one end to the other
of the land in her fine coach, so proud was she of its splendor; but
even pride could not heal the bruises she got in jolting about in it,
nor the terror she felt of being overturned. So she gradually left off
using it, and consoled herself by keeping it standing in all good
weather in full sight from the highway, that everybody might know she
had it.

It was a sore trial to Jeanne that she had no children,--a sore trial
also to her wicked old father, who had plotted that the great Blaycke
estates should go down in the hands of his descendants. Not so Willan
Blaycke. It was undoubtedly