taking the girl's
arm, and pushing her forwards. The young man looked at her steadily and
gravely for a minute; then rose, and carefully marking the page in the
folio which hitherto had lain open upon his knee, said, still in the
same heavy, indifferent manner, 'I will call my mother, she will know.'

He opened a door which looked into a warm bright kitchen, ruddy with
the light of the fire over which three women were apparently engaged
in cooking something, while a fourth, an old Indian woman, of a
greenish-brown colour, shrivelled up and bent with apparent age, moved
backwards and forwards, evidently fetching the others the articles they
required.

'Mother,' said the young man; and having arrested her attention, he
pointed over his shoulder to the newly-arrived strangers, and returned
to the study of his book, from time to time, however, furtively
examining Lois from beneath his dark shaggy eyebrows.

A tall, largely made woman, past middle life, came in from the kitchen,
and stood reconnoitring the strangers.

Captain Holdernesse spoke.

'This is Lois Barclay, Master Ralph Hickson's niece.'

'I know nothing of her,' said the mistress of the house, in a deep
voice, almost as masculine as her son's.

'Master Hickson received his sister's letter, did he not? I sent it off
myself by a lad named Elias Wellcome, who left Boston for this place
yester morning.'

'Ralph Hickson has received no such letter. He lies bedridden in the
chamber beyond. Any letters for him must come through my hands;
wherefore I can affirm with certainty that no such letter has been
delivered here. His sister Barclay, she that was Henrietta Hickson, and
whose husband took the oaths to Charles Stuart, and stuck by his living
when all godly men left theirs----'

Lois, who had thought her heart was dead and cold a minute before at
the ungracious reception she had met with, felt words come up into her
mouth at the implied insult to her father, and spoke out, to her own
and the captain's astonishment:

'They might be godly men who left their churches on that day of which
you speak, madam; but they alone were not the godly men, and no one has
a right to limit true godliness for mere opinion's sake.'

'Well said, lass,' spoke out the captain, looking round upon her with a
kind of admiring wonder, and patting her on the back.

Lois and her aunt gazed into each other's eyes unflinchingly, for a
minute or two of silence; but the girl felt her c