But the young girl who sat in the little family-room, late one quiet evening, had learned to love the dark hours, and so listened to the mighty and interminable throb of those waves with strange sympathy. The dull tick of an old oak clock, whose coffin-like frame was heavy with carvings, seemed answering the eternal anthem with its small noise, like a human voice striving to answer the hymns of universal nature; and the petty sound irritated her nerves, while the everlasting sweep, afar off, made her heart swell and her eye kindle. As Abigail Williams sat thus restlessly listening, Tituba, the old Indian woman, came into the room, and sat down on the floor at her feet. The woman did not speak, but lifted her face, wrinkled like a dried plum, to that of the young girl, and waited to be addressed. The large, earnest eyes of Abby Williams looked down upon the Indian. "It is late, Tituba," she said, "the clock has struck eleven, and no sign of his coming!" "He will be here--Wahpee would have been home long ago, if any thing had kept the young chief away. Are you sleepy, Abigail?" "Sleepy! no. I shall never be sleepy again. The knowledge of who I am, and what they are in whose bosom I have slept all my life, keeps rest away from me--I know well how Judas felt when he sold his Lord." Tituba shook her head. She had no Bible, and could not be made to comprehend what one meant, though she had lived with the minister at Salem since Abigail was an infant. Hers was a wilder and more romantic religion--the Manitou of the Indians was her God, and she read his word in the leaves of the forest and the rush of the mountain stream. With her, treachery to the whites was faith to the Indian. Had Judas betrayed his enemy, she would have considered him a hero: but to betray his Master--old Tituba could not have understood that! "You look like her now," whispered the woman, folding her hands over her knees, and rocking back and forth on the floor, as she always did when about to talk of the past. "My mother--do I look like her?" said Abigail. "About the eyes, when there is trouble in them; but hers were blue, like a periwinkle in the morning, while yours are darker, and change so." "And her--that other woman--that grand, sweet-spoken woman, whose spirit will not rest--Anna Hutchinson--my grandmother? Have you seen her, Tituba?" "Yes, when the warriors brought her into the forest for sacrifice. I was there. I watched the women, while they gathered pitch pine-knots, and scattered turpentine over the wood which the braves heaped on her death fire!" "Did they torture her?" "No. The wood was piled high; the Pequod women had brought heaps of pitch pine; the warriors, who held her and her little ones, came forward, ready to throw them on the flames together; they only waited for the chief!" "And she stood ready for this terrible death?" broke in Abigail. "Was she brave, or was it only in speech that she proved valiant?"