This was revenge,--revenge indeed,--a blow that would strike her as well as her victim. She would lose French Cross. Her aunt would cast her off; she would be a beggar. The thought was maddening, stunning. She had never had any sorrow like this. Bernal Huntington's loss had occasioned her sullen grief,--and even in the midst of her terror a passionate remembrance of him swept into her mind,--but that was grief of the mind only. She had suffered then, but not like this, not like this. Her whole body was now in agony,--the delicate pampered body that might soon be snatched from the luxuries so necessary to it. It would have to suffer privations that would be strange and fatal. A deathly sickness overpowered her, and she buried her face in her hands. Relentless figures flitted, before her,--Miss Gastonguay grim and inexorable, Derrice agitated and weeping, Justin with a face turned sternly from her. Her mind gave way under the strain imposed on it, and her shrinking body grew weak. The pale faces grew black, faded into mist, and she fell headlong on the floor. CHAPTER XXVIII. CAPTAIN WHITE'S BALL PLAY. Prosperity and Tribulation had set out a prettily equipped table on the patch of green grass beside the tranquil river. Capacious baskets stood beside them, and their slow moving figures showed slim and black against a dull green background of firs. Miss Gastonguay would not allow these servants to wear livery. Her coachman was obliged to do so. He had always been an underling, but tyrannical as she often showed herself with these two favourites, she never allowed them to forget that she remembered a time when they had been in a position of independence. Therefore their lives were happy. They followed the whims of their mistress with childish enjoyment, and just now they were as frolicsome as two schoolboys over this departure from the usual order of the day. The cold dishes were all arranged carefully on the table. Flaming cardinal flowers and spikes of blue pickerel weed lay loosely about the white cloth; the hot dishes watched by the cook O'Toole were growing hotter by a leaping fire, yet Miss Gastonguay would not give the signal to serve the meal. "Hush," she said, at last, "Mrs. Mercer is going to recite to us." Prosperity and Tribulation demurely seated themselves and listened to the young lady as she drew herself up erect on her heap of cushions, and, with eyes wandering across the river, declaimed in a girlish way Whittier's exquisite lines on the fabled city of the early Maine Voyagers. Captain White could not listen. He tried to follow the fortunes of the Christian knight, "who, with his henchman bold, sought through the dim wood the domes and spires of Norumbega's town," but the effort was a failure.