10
ion, was at an end. Miss Meadowcroft rose with her ghostly solemnity, and granted me my dismissal in these words:
"We are early people at the farm, Mr. Lefrank. I wish you good-night."
She laid her bony hands on the back of Mr. Meadowcroft's invalid-chair, cut him short in his farewell salutation to me, and wheeled him out to his bed as if she were wheeling him out to his grave.
"Do you go to your room immediately, sir? If not, may I offer you a cigar--provided the young gentlemen will permit it?"
So, picking his words with painful deliberation, and pointing his reference to "the young gentlemen" with one sardonic side-look at them, Mr. John Jago performed the duties of hospitality on his side. I excused myself from accepting the cigar. With studied politeness, the man of the glittering brown eyes wished me a goodnight's rest, and left the room.
Ambrose and Silas both approached me hospitably, with their open cigar-cases in their hands.
"You were quite right to say 'No,'" Ambrose began. "Never smoke with John Jago. His cigars will poison you."
"And never believe a word John Jago says to you," added Silas. "He is the greatest liar in America, let the other be whom he may."
Naomi shook her forefinger reproachfully at them, as if the two sturdy young farmers had been two children.
"What will Mr. Lefrank think," she said, "if you talk in that way of a person whom your father respects and trusts? Go and smoke. I am ashamed of both of you."
Silas slunk away without a word of protest. Ambrose stood his ground, evidently bent on making his peace with Naomi before he left her.
Seeing that I was in the way, I walked aside toward a glass door at the lower end of the room. The door opened on the trim little farm-garden, bathed at that moment in lovely moonlight. I stepped out to enjoy the scene, and found my way to a seat under an elm-tree. The grand repose of nature had never looked so unutterably solemn and beautiful as it now appeared, after what