Going off in his wrath from his morning’s conversation with Harry, Mr. Draper thought he heard the young prisoner speak behind him; and, indeed, Harry had risen, and uttered a half-exclamation to call the lawyer back. But he was proud, and the other offended: Harry checked words, and Draper did not choose to stop. It wound Harry’s pride to be obliged to humble himself before the lawyer, and to have to yield from mere lack and desire of money. “An hour hence will do as well,” thought Harry, and lapsed sulkily on to the bed again. No, he did not care for Maria Esmond! No: he was ashamed of the way in which he had been entrapped into that engagement. A wily and experienced woman, she had cheated his boyish ardour. She had taken unfair advantage of him, as her brother had at play. They were his own flesh and blood, and they ought to have spared him. Instead, one and the other had made a prey of him, and had used him for their selfish ends. He thought how they had betrayed the rights of hospitality: how they had made a victim of the young kinsman who came confiding within their gates. His heart was sore wounded: his head sank back on his pillow: bitter tears wetted it. “Had they come to Virginia,” he thought, “I had given them a different welcome!”

He was roused from this mood of despondency by Gumbo’s grinning face at his door, who said a lady was come to see Master Harry, and behind the lad came the lady in the capuchin, of whom we have just made mention. Harry sat up, pale and haggard, on his bed. The lady, with a sob, and almost ere the servant-man withdrew, ran towards the young prisoner, put her arms round his neck with real emotion and a maternal tenderness, sobbed over his pale cheek and kissed it in the midst of plentiful tears, and cried out —

“Oh, my Harry! Did I ever, ever think to see thee here?”

He started back, scared as it seemed at her presence, but she sank down at the bedside, and seized his feverish hand, and embraced his knees. She had a real regard and tenderness for him. The wretched place in which she found him, his wretched look, filled her heart with a sincere love and pity.

“I— I thought none of you would come!” said poor Harry, with a groan.

More tears, more kisses of the hot young hand, more clasps and pressure with hers, were the lady’s reply for a moment or two.

“Oh, my dear! my dear! I cannot bear to think of thee in misery,” she sobbed out.

Hardened though it might be, that heart was not all marble — that dreary life not all desert. Harry’s mother could not have been fonder, nor her tones more tender than those of his kinswoman now kneeling at his feet.

“Some of the debts, I fear, were owing to my extravagance!” she said (and this was true). “You bought trinkets and jewels in order to give me pleasure. Oh, how I hate them now! I little thought I ever could! I have brought them all with me, and more trinkets — here! and here! and all the money I have in the world!”

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