waiting for some command.

"Well, Miss Agnes, I'se here, what does the master please to want?"

It was rather difficult for James Harrington, self-possessed as he was,
to answer that question. The woman had taken him by surprise. Her
appearance was so completely that of a common-place servant, that he was
silenced by the very surprise she had given him. But for her dress, he
would not have believed in her identity with the person he had seen in
the open air, and that was worn with a slovenliness altogether unlike
the ease remarkable in the person whom she represented, without
conveying an impression of absolute identity.

Harrington had spent his early life in the South, and was at no loss to
comprehend the peculiar class to which this woman belonged. He answered
her quietly, but still with suspicion:

"Nothing, aunty, except that you will oblige me with a glass of water."

The woman shuffled across the room, and brought him some water, which
she placed scrupulously on a plate, by way of waiter, before presenting
it. Her air--the loose, indolent gait, like that of a leopard moving
sleepily around its lair--convinced him that she had been nothing more
than a common household slave, out of place in her cold, and almost
poverty-stricken northern home. He drank the water she gave him, and
handing back the glass, inquired if she did not feel lonely and chilled
by the cold climate?

"I'se allus warm and comfortable where dat ere chile is," said the
woman, looking at Agnes, "any place 'pears like home when she's by, and
I 'xpect she feels like dat where old aunty is, if she is poor."

"She is happy in having one faithful friend," answered Harrington, more
and more satisfied that the woman was simply what she seemed.

A strange smile quivered for a moment around Agnes Barker's lip, but as
Harrington turned his glance that way, it subsided into a look of gentle
humility.

"You will inform the ladies that I shall return to-night. It proved a
chilly day for sketching, and finding myself nearer my own home than the
mansion-house, I stole a few moments for poor, old, lonesome mammy
here."

Harrington had arisen as she commenced speaking, and with a grave bend
of the head, promised to convey her message.

The two women watched him as he crossed the rude garden, and mounted his
horse; then drawing hurriedly back into the house, they closed the door.

"What could have brought him here? Did she send him?" inquired the
slav