--just enough not to be disagreeable; then he
turned the conversation. Mr. Moore was strong at that; he thought it a
great moral engine, and had often wondered (to Penelope) that it was not
employed oftener. For instance, in difficult cases: if violent language
were being used in one's presence--turn the conversation; in family
quarrels and disagreements--the same; in political discussions of a
heated nature--surely there could be no method so simple or so
efficacious.

It proved efficacious now in the face of Lucian's frivolity. "Our next
course will consist of oysters," he remarked.

"Where are they?" demanded Lucian, hungrily.

"For the present concealed; I conjectured that the sight of two fires
might prove oppressive. The arrangements, however, have been well made;
they are in progress behind that far thicket, and the sons of the
squatter are in charge."

The sons of the squatter being summoned by what Mr. Moore called
"yodeling," a pastoral cry which he sounded forth unexpectedly and
wildly between his two hands, brought the hot rocks to the company by
the simple process of tumbling them into a piece of sackcloth and
dragging them over the ground. They were really rocks, fragments broken
off, studded with small oysters; many parts of the lagoon were lined
with these miniature peaks. Mr. Moore produced oyster-knives; and, with
the best conscience in the world, they added another to the shell-heaps
of Florida for the labors of future antiquarians.

And then, presently, they embarked. The sun was sinking; they floated
away from the squatter's camp, down the winding creek between the
leaning palmettoes, across the salt-marsh, over which the crows were now
flying in a long line, and out upon the sunset-tinted lagoon. The
_Emperadora_ was waiting for them; it was moonlight when they reached
home.

CHAPTER XIX.

The next afternoon Margaret was strolling in the old garden of East
Angels. The place now belonged to Evert Winthrop; but it had not pleased
him to make many changes, and the garden remained almost as much of a
blooming wilderness as before. When at home (and it was seldom that she
was absent for any length of time, as she had been the previous day)
Margaret was occupied at this hour; it was the hour when Mrs. Rutherford
liked to have "some one" read to her. This "some one" was always
Margaret.

Poor Aunt Katrina had been a close prisoner all summer; an affection of
the hip had prostrated her s