ants a wife, and there is nobody I should like so
well for him as you. I will go home and send Tom to talk with you about
it."

Chloe looked very much frightened, and exclaimed: "Please don't, Massa
Gordonmammon, I don't want to be married."

"But it's right and proper you should be married," rejoined the
minister; "and Tom wants a wife. It's your duty, Chloe, to do whatever
your minister and your mistress tell you to do."

That look from Jim came up as a bright vision before poor Chloe, and she
burst into tears.

"I will come again when your mind is in a state more suited to your
condition," said the minister. "At present your disposition seems to be
rebellious. I will leave you to think of what I have said."

But thinking made Chloe feel still more rebellious. Tom was fat and
stupid, with thick lips, and small, dull-looking eyes. He compared very
unfavorably with her bright and handsome Jim. She swayed back and forth,
and groaned. She thought over all the particulars of that last walk on
the beach, and murmured to herself, "He looked jest as ef he _wanted_ to
say suthin'."

She thought of Tom and groaned again; and underlying all her confusion
of thoughts there was a miserable feeling that, if the minister and her
mistress both said she must marry Tom, there was no help for it.

The next day, she slashed and slammed round in an extraordinary manner.
She broke a mug and a bowl, and sanded the floor with a general
conglomeration of scratches, instead of the neat herring-bone on which
she usually prided herself. It was the only way she had to exercise her
free-will in its desperate struggle with necessity.

Mrs. Lawton, who never thought of her in any other light than as a
machine, did not know what to make of these singular proceedings. "What
upon airth ails you?" exclaimed she. "I do believe the gal's gone
crazy."

Chloe paused in her harum-scarum sweeping, and said, with a look and
tone almost defiant, "I don't _want_ to marry Tom."

"But the minister wants you to marry him," replied Mrs. Lawton, "and you
ought to mind the minister."

Chloe did not dare to dispute that assertion, but she dashed her broom
round in the sand, in a very rebellious manner.

"Mind what you're about, gal!" exclaimed Mrs. Lawton. "I am not going to
put up with such tantrums."

Chloe was acquainted with the weight of her mistress's hand, and she
moved the broom round in more systematic fashion; but there was a
tempest raging i