say, their wet blankets
happened to be their best friends.

In the case of Hester, it was Sally. The more hopeful and cheery Hester
became, the more did her black friend shake her woolly head and look
dismal.

"Why, Sally, dear, what's the matter with you?" asked the former one
day, as they sat together in the bower on the roof, after returning from
their visit to the slave-gang.

A shake of the girl's head and an unutterable expression in her
magnificent black eyes made Hester quite uneasy.

"Do tell me, Sally. Is there anything the matter with you?"

"De matter wid me? Oh no! Not'ing's neber de matter wid me--'cept when
I eats too much--but it's you an' your fadder I's t'inkin' ob."

"But we are both getting on very well, Sally, are we not? I am quite
safe here, and darling father is growing stronger and fatter every day,
thank God! and then our hope is very strong. Why should you be
anxious?"

Sally prefaced her reply with one of the professional gasps wherewith
she was wont to bring down the iron pestle.

"Well, now, you white folks am de greatest ijits eber was born. Do you
t'ink you'll deliber your fadder from de Moors by feedin' him on
biscuits an' _hope_? What's de end ob all dis to come to? das what I
want to know. Ob course you can't go on for eber. You sure to be
cotched at last, and de whole affair'll bust up. You'll be tooked away,
an' your fadder'll be t'rowed on de hooks or whacked to deaf. Oh! I's
most mis'rable!"

The poor creature seemed inclined to howl at this point, but she
constrained herself and didn't.

In the gloom of the cheerless Bagnio, Hugh Sommers found his wet blanket
in Edouard Laronde.

"But it is unwise to look only at the bright side of things," said the
Frenchman, after sympathising with his friend's joy in having discovered
his daughter so unexpectedly and in such a curious manner. "No doubt,
from her disguise, she must, as you say, be in hiding, and in
comparative safety with friends, else she could not be moving so freely
about this accursed city, but what is to be the end of it all?"

Laronde unconsciously echoed Sally's question to Hester, but Hugh
Sommers had not as much to say in reply as his daughter, for he was too
well acquainted with the possibilities of life to suppose that biscuits
and hope would do much towards the "end," although valuable auxiliaries
in the meantime.

"I see not the end, Laronde," he said, after a pause; "but the end is i