“Forgive me, Miss Howell. If I keep still any longer I shall be awful wicked. I or’to have told you who you be long ago, but bein’ I didn’t I must tell you now. I’ve been hangin’ ’round a good while to see you alone, but couldn’t. I came to the door a day or two ago and asked for a drink of water, but that woman with the big black eyes was in the kitchen, and acted as if she mistrusted I wanted to steal, for she staid by watching me till I got tired, and went off without seeing you at all. You know that old hut across the river where there don’t nobody live. Come there to-morrow just as it is getting dark, and I will tell you who you be. I know, for I’m the very one that brung you to the door. You ain’t low-lived, so don’t go to worryin’ about that; and if you are afraid to come alone, let that Judge come with you, and stay a little ways off. Now don’t fail to be there, for it is important for you to know. “E. B.” For a time after reading this Mildred sat in a kind of maze. She had been so happy of late that she had ceased to wonder who she was. Indeed she scarcely cared to know, particularly if the information must come through as ignorant a channel as this letter would seem to indicate. “What ought I to do?” she said, one moment half resolving to keep the appointment at the deserted hut, as it was called, and the next shrinking from doing so with an undefinable presentiment that some great evil would result. “I wish Lawrence was here to go with me,” she thought, but as that could not be, she determined at last to show the note to the Judge and ask him his advice. “What the plague,” exclaimed the Judge, reading the note a second time. “Somebody knows who you are? Brought you herself in the basket? Ain’t from a low-lived family? What does the old hag mean? No, no, gipsy. Let her go to grass. We don’t care who you are. It’s enough that I’ve taken you for my daughter, and that in little more than three weeks, Lawrence will take you for his wife. No, no. Let E. B. sit in the deserted hut till she’s sick of it.” And this he said because he, too, experienced a most unaccountable sensation of dread, as if a cloud were hovering over Mildred, darker, far darker than the one from under which she had so recently passed. “But,” persisted Mildred, “maybe I ought to know. I wonder who this woman is. She says she stopped here once for a drink, and was frightened off by the woman with the big black eyes. That must have been Geraldine.” “Did you speak to me?” asked the lady in question, who was passing through the hall, and had heard her name. “Don’t tell her of the note. Simply ask about the woman,” whispered the Judge, feeling that if anything about Mildred should prove to be wrong, he would rather no one but themselves should know it.