Poor Martha! Never captive carried to slavery felt such dread as did she on her eastward journey. When the friend who had borne her company left her at a station near Summerfield, even the stoicism of Martha gave way before the horror of the unknown and she clung to the last landmark of her old life, with a sobbing eagerness, which even a carefully nurtured child might know. But there was no trace of frail, human grief in the little maiden who lifted the sullen blackness of her big eyes to Aunt Jenny's face that evening, who received Aunt Mary's greeting with a self-possessed composure alarming to that shy and gentle lady, and who gave the same degree of cold attention to Aunt Amy's sweet speeches. They had looked forward to the coming of Arthur's daughter with a strange mixture of excitement, pleasure, and dread. The dread was predominant now. For this stern little woman was not their flesh and blood, not the child of their brother, but of the woman who had kept them apart from their brother in his trouble and sickness and death. Martha was quiet and docile enough. In fact she did what she was told with a resignation most depressing. Aunt Jenny took her to church and the sight of her critical dark eyes roving over minister and congregation spoiled the sermon for Aunt Jenny. Aunt Mary told her stories of her father intended to be gently humorous. In the midst of them Martha jumped up and ran off into the garden. She cried there for half an hour, but nobody ever knew, and this business lost her the little hold she had had on Aunt Mary's heart. Aunt Amy tried to amuse her and took her to Sunday-school, and to the Band of Hope. She gave her a doll and invited the neighbor's children to come and take tea. The doll was a source of secret amusement to Martha, but the visits of these pretty and proper children were trials which she could scarcely bear with patience. All the while, as the aunts half suspected, she was criticising everything that came within the ken of her hungry eyes. She found Aunt Jenny imperious, Aunt Mary dull, and knew that Aunt Amy was thinking of her sweet smile as she smiled. For Martha was outside of it all, a mere spectator of this life of peace and quiet and plenty, and she secretly hungered after something to care for--something to take the place of the little brothers and sisters who had always run to her to have their faces washed and their aprons buttoned. They expected her to play with dolls, she, Martha Clarke, who had had real work to do and had learned to push and crowd her own way.