The minister’s wife looked down upon her with a bitter smile. “So you’ve had your fool’s paradise? Well, once I had mine, though ’twas not your kind. ’Tis a pretty country, Audrey, but it’s not long before they turn you out.” She laughed somewhat drearily, then in a moment turned shrew again. “He never knew what people were saying?” she cried. “You little fool, do you suppose he cared? ’Twas you that played your cards all wrong with your Governor’s ball last night!--setting up for a lady, forsooth!--bringing all the town about your ears! You might have known that he would never have taken you there in his senses. At Fair View things went very well. He was entertained,--and I meant to see that no harm came of it,--and Darden got his support in the vestry. For he was bit,--there’s no doubt of that,--though what he ever saw in you more than big eyes and a brown skin, the Lord knows, not I! Only your friend!--a fine gentleman just from London, with a whole Canterbury book of stories about his life there, to spend a’most a summer on the road between his plantation and a wretched glebe house because he was only your friend, and had saved you from the Indians when you were a child, and wished to be kind to you still! I’ll tell you who did wish to be kind to you, and that was Jean Hugon, the trader, who wanted to marry you.” Audrey rose to her feet, and moved slowly backward to the wall. Mistress Deborah went shrilly on: “I dare swear you believe that Mr. Haward had you in mind all the years he was gone from Virginia? Well, he didn’t. He puts you with Darden and me, and he says, ‘There’s the strip of Oronoko down by the swamp,--I’ve told my agent that you’re to have from it so many pounds a year;’ and he sails away to London and all the fine things there, and never thinks of you more until he comes back to Virginia and sees you last May Day at Jamestown. Next morning he comes riding to the glebe house. ‘And so,’ he says to Darden, ‘and so my little maid that I brought for trophy out of the Appalachian Mountains is a woman grown? Faith, I’d quite forgot the child; but Saunderson tells me that you have not forgot to draw upon my Oronoko.’ That’s all the remembrance you were held in, Audrey.” She paused to take breath, and to look with shrewish triumph at the girl who leaned against the wall. “I like not waking up,” said Audrey to herself. “It were easier to die. Perhaps I am dying.” “And then out he walks to find and talk to you, and in sets your pretty summer of all play and no work!” went on the other, in a high voice. “Oh, there was kindness enough, once you had caught his fancy! I wonder if the lady at Westover praised his kindness? They say she is a proud young lady: I wonder if she liked your being at the ball last night? When she comes to Fair View, I’ll take my oath that you’ll walk no more in its garden! But perhaps she won’t come now,--though her maid Chloe told Mistress Bray’s Martha that she certainly loves him”--