"Wrong I may have been, dadda, to have taken it to begin with, but Colonel Brereton refused to receive it from me, and when he himself placed it about my picture, I could not but feel that it had truly become mine, and that I could dispose of it." "But who bought it of ye, Jan?" inquired the parent. "That I know not," said the girl, though hesitating and colouring at the question in her own mind whether she were not prevaricating, for Andre's face and her own suspicions had really convinced her who was the nameless buyer. "Captain Andre assured me that the frame was fully worth five hundred pounds." "That I will not gainsay, lass," replied the squire, "and the only blame I will lay on ye is that ye did not consult me before acting, for I could have negotiated it as well, and should have so managed as not to have offended Clowes. However, I make no doubt he'll not hold rancour when he knows that the money came by the sale of a piece of jewelry, and was not merely borrowed. Did ye take your picture from the frame?" "No, dadda. I did so once before, only to bring suspicion on myself; so this time I let it remain." "Ye might as well have removed it," said Mr. Meredith, "for it could have added no money value to it." Yet the squire had once been a lover, and should have known otherwise. This said, he returned to Clowes, and sought to mollify him by a statement of how the money had been obtained. "Humph!" grunted the baron. "She'd better have brought the trinket to me, for I'd gladly have been the purchaser, for more even than she got by it." "I told the lass she should have left the sale of it to me," answered the squire, "but ye know what women are." "Egad, I sometimes think, shallow as the sex is, no man fully knows that. However, we will waste no further parley on the matter. Put the money in your purse, man, for your future needs, and think naught about the debt to me." "Nay, Clowes. Since the money is here, 't is as well to pay up." And protest and argue as the commissary would, nothing would do the squire but to count out the amount on the spot from the heap of guineas, and to pocket, not without some satisfaction, the small surplus that remained. Then he left the room in great good cheer; but for some time after he was gone, the baron, leaving the gold piled on the table, paced the room in an evident fit of temper, while muttering to himself and occasionally shaking his head threateningly. The gazetting of Mr. Meredith served only to increase this half-stifled anger, and on the very evening his appointment was announced in the "Pennsylvania Ledger," the commissary recurred to his proposal. "I heard by chance to-day that young Hennion had fallen a victim to the camp fever," he told the squire, "and only held my tongue before the ladies through not wishing to be the reporter of bad tidings--though, as I understood it, neither Mrs. Meredith nor Miss Janice really wished the match."