Without warning, she seized my hand, and with her sharp leopard teeth bit until the blood flowed. Then surveying her work, she kissed the pin-prick of a wound with unction. When she raised her face, there was a trickle of blood on her lip and chin. Walking to a mirror with a careless, flinging step, Peg glanced her face over, and I thought with relish. “See if there do not come a pretty white mark when it heals.” This she told me in an arch manner, and with chin on shoulder, and the fleck of blood on her chin. “Now if I but dared,” she went on, returning to the glass, “I would wear that blood always and never wash it away. But the world! the world!--ah, the world! One must wash one's face for the world although one owes the world nothing.” Peg, now in a climax of bubbling spirits, and pouring a spoonful of water on her handkerchief, washed off the spots of red, transferring them to her tiny square of cambric. This she contemplated with a sort of surprised delight, as tendering a new idea. “I need never wash that, at any rate,” said she. Then with her glancing eyes on me: “You will wear my mark now;--Peg's mark for her slave!--who would do her good.” The next moment she went singing across the lawn for her home, leaving me to think on the caprices of our radiant, reckless, blooming, madcap Peg. All this by the way, however; now to return to our day of the Reverend Campbell's call upon the General. Peg was still curled in her big armchair when, following his interview with the General, the Reverend Campbell left the mansion. It was she who told his departure to me where I wrought at my desk. Peg caught a flutter of him through the large window. “Oh!” cried Peg, “there goes our Reverend Raven.” Looking up from where I worked, I beheld the Reverend Campbell making speed out of the grounds. In such hurry was he that he left the walk of gravel, and to save a corner would cut across the grass. The black-foot creature slouched away for all mankind like unto some henroost fox of the night whom daylight had surprised and who now went skulking for the comforting safe darkness of his burrow. “It is wonder,” said Peg, “what could induce the good General to tolerate the presence of our Reverend Raven for so long. What should be the interest in his croakings?” As Peg spoke, the General's gaunt form appeared in the door. He was more than half warm with an angry excitement. Without pause or first words of greeting, he addressed himself to Peg. “Child, where was Timberlake two years ago this summer?--where was he in June?”