“She is a pretty maid, but she is not for you, nor for any other young man unless he come for her with a coach and four, with a black gentleman a-driving,” said his aunt’s voice half mockingly at his side. Then the young man turned and questioned her quite boldly. “I beg of you to tell me what you mean, aunt,” he said. Then Mistress Tabitha Hopkins, holding her Sabbath gown high above her hooped satin petticoat as she stepped along, unfolded to her nephew Darius Hopkins the strange romance of Persis Buckley’s life. “’Tis a shame!” cried the young man, indignantly, when she had finished--“a shame, to keep her a prisoner in this fashion!” “’Tis only a prince with a coach and four can set her free. A prince from over seas, with a black gentleman a-driving,” said his aunt. Darius turned, and stared back across the flat meadow-land at Ichabod Buckley’s house. It was late August now, and the meadow had great rosy patches of marsh-rosemary flung upon it like silken cloaks of cavaliers, and far-seen purple plumes of blazing-star. Darius studied slowly the low gray walls and long slant of gray roofs in the distance. “A strong right arm and a willing heart might free her, were he prince or not!” said he. And he flung out his own right arm as if it were the one to do it. “Were the maid willing to be freed,” said Mistress Tabitha, softly. Darius colored. “That is true, aunt,” he said, with a downcast and humbled air, and he turned and went on soberly. Mistress Tabitha looked at her nephew’s handsome face, and thought to herself, with loving but jealous pride, that no maid could refuse him as a deliverer. But she would not tell him so, for her heart was still sore at his preference of Persis to herself. Darius Hopkins had an uneasy visit at his aunt Tabitha’s. He did not speak again of Persis Buckley, but he thought the more. Useless, as he told himself, as either hopes or fears were, they sprang up in his heart like persistent flames, and could not be trodden out. He told himself that it was not sensible to think that the grand Englishman would ever come for Persis after all these years, and that it was nothing to him if he did. Yet he often trembled when he came in sight of her house lest he see a coach and four standing before it, and see her carried away before his very eyes. And sometimes he would look at his own comely face in the glass, and look into his own heart, and feel as if the love therein must compel her even against her will; for she was not an angel or a goddess, after all, beautiful as she was, but only a mortal woman. “She cannot love this man whom she has not seen since she was a child, and he must be an old man now,” reasoned Darius, viewing his own gallant young face in the glass. And he smiled with hope, although he knew that he could not reasonably expect to have more of Persis than the sight of her face in the meeting-house or at the window were he to stay in the village a year.