!"

"It's not that, man!" returned the Englishman, with a touch of
indignation. "If I had nothing to worry me but the pain of my feet I'd
have been asleep by now. I have worse things to groan about than you
can guess, maybe."

"Well, well, monsieur," said the Frenchman, in a resigned tone, as he
raised himself on one elbow and leaned his back against the stone wall,
"since you have driven sleep from my eyes, perhaps you will give
employment to my ears, by telling me for what it is that you groan?"

There was something so peculiar in the tone and manner in which this was
said--so cool and off-hand, yet withal so kind--that Sommers at once
agreed.

"I'll do it," he said, "if you will treat me to the same thing in
return. Fair exchange! You see, I am by profession a merchant, and
must have value for what I give."

And thus on that night the two unfortunates had exchanged confidences,
and formed the friendship to which we have referred.

To this man, then--whose name was Edouard Laronde--Sommers related the
incident that had occurred that day during the noontide period of rest.

"It is strange. I know not what to think," said Laronde, when his
friend concluded. "If it had been a white girl I could have understood
that it might be your daughter in disguise, though even in this case
there would have been several reasons against the theory, for, in the
first place, you tell me that your daughter--your Hester--is very
pretty, and no pretty English girl could go about this city in any
disguise without being discovered at once. Now you tell me that this
girl was black--a negress?"

"Ay, as black as a coal," responded the merchant.

"Well, if, as you say, your Hester is pretty--"

"Pretty, man! She's not pretty," interrupted the Englishman
impatiently; "I tell you she is beautiful!"

"Of course, I understand," returned the other, with a smile that the
darkness of the place concealed, "I should have said beautiful! Well,
thick lips and flat nose and high cheek-bones and woolly hair are, you
know, incompatible with beauty as understood by Englishmen--"

"Or Frenchmen either," added Sommers. "That's quite true, Laronde,
though I must confess that I paid no attention to her face when she was
approaching me, and after she dropped the biscuits in my lap she was so
far past that I only saw a bit of her black cheek and her back, which
latter, you know, was enveloped from head to foot in that loose blue
cotton thin