'Squire Boyle listened with his fork raised and his mouth half open. He had long been suspected of holding the views of the abolitionists; it was known that he had favored Henry Clay's scheme for gradual emancipation. He had been studiedly discreet, but being by birth a Northern man, suspicion naturally turned an eye upon him. Sometimes when he must have felt that his silence was eating him like an internal cancer, he had come to Old Master to be bold with healthful utterances, but of late, as the country became more deeply stirred, Old Master warned him to swallow rapidly whenever he felt a strong disposition to talk upon the subject of abolition. And now he swallowed with such vigor and rapidity that a stranger to the precaution placed upon his speech must surely have thought that he was choking to death. "'Squire, did you swallow something the wrong way?" Mr. Clem asked, leaning over toward him. "No, something wants to come up the right way," the 'squire piped, the red Adam's apple at his thin throat dodging like a wood-pecker. "I want to say something, but I won't. But the time will come when I will stand on a hill--I've got it picked out--and bawl what I think. Guilford, you are fixing to scold me, sir, and I must ask you not to say a word." Old Master laughed at this, the old 'squire's desperate threat of rebellion, and had taken up a bit of bread to roll his customary bolus, when yellow Sam, who had been sent to town, came in with a letter. Old Miss began at once to speculate as to whom it could be from, and Old Master, winking at Bob and looking at her as he wiped his glasses, said that he supposed he could put the letter under his plate and wonder a long time as to the identity of the writer. "But happily," said he, again winking his mischievous eye, "we are provided with means whereby we can cut through all speculation and get at once into the heart and the truth of the subject. To be brief," he added, "we can open the letter." "Well, for goodness sake, why don't you?" his wife broke in, as she always did when she saw him indulging a droll humor. "Give it to me." "Oh, no," he laughed, putting back her hand. "There may be secrets in this epistle that belong alone to the great free-masonry of men." "And your organization is shameful enough," she said, not without a show of ill-temper (for any allusion to an understanding in which she was not included always appeared to cut her). "But I must acknowledge its rare perfection as an organization," she went on. "Its devotees do not have to be sworn, unless nature swears them at birth." By this time the single leaf of the letter was shaking under Old Master's gaze. "Read it," he said huskily, handing it to Bob. And he bowed his head over the table. The note was from Miss May. It told us that her husband was dead, and that she, with her little child, was about to start for home. CHAPTER XXIII.