“_Tobacco_,” something whispered, but Hugh answered promptly, “No, sir, I shan’t! I’ll sell my shirts, before I’ll give up my best friend. It’s all the comfort I have when I get a fit of the blues. Oh, you needn’t try to come it!” and Hugh shook his head defiantly at his unseen interlocutor, urging that ’twas a filthy practice at best, and productive of no good. “You needn’t try for I won’t,” and Hugh deliberately lighted a cigar and resumed his soliloquy, while he complacently watched the little blue rings curling so gracefully above his head. “Blamed if I can think of any thing else, but maybe I shall. I might sell something, I suppose. There’s Harney wants to buy Bet, but Ad never rides any other horse, and she does ride uncommonly well, if she _is_ Ad. There’s the negroes, more than I need,” but from this suggestion Hugh turned away quite as decidedly as from the one touching his tobacco. “He didn’t believe much in negroes any way, surely not in selling them; besides that, nobody’d want them after they’d been spoiled as he had spoiled them,” and he laughed aloud as he fancied a new master trying to break in old Chloe, who had ruled at Spring Bank so long that she almost fancied she owned it. No, Hugh wouldn’t sell his servants, and the negroes sleeping so soundly in their cabins had nothing to fear from him. _Horses_ were suggested again. “You have other horses than Bet,” and Hugh was conscious of a pang which wrung from him a groan, for his horses were his idols, and parting with them would be like severing a right hand. It was too terrible to think about, and Hugh dismissed it as an alternative which might have to be considered another time. Then hope made her voice heard above the little blue imps tormenting him so sadly. He should get along somehow. Something would turn up. Ad might marry and go away. He knew it was wrong, and yet he could not help thinking it would be nice to come home some day and not find her there, with her fault-finding, and her sarcastic remarks. What made her so different from his mother—so different from the little sister he always remembered with a throb of delight? He had loved her, and he thought of her now as she used to look in her dainty white frocks, with the strings of coral he had bought with nuts picked on the New England hills.