Abby stooped down, trembling all over, and drew the old woman up to her bosom. She kissed her withered face and her swarthy hands, with a burst of passionate feeling. "And is it so? God forgive me that I did not guess this before! And you have been our slave, our drudge! The meanest work of the house has always been put upon Tituba--poor old Tituba, who saved our mothers from the flames, who followed us from wilderness to settlement, who left her own people for our sakes. And you are so old too! How many years, Tituba, has it taken to make this hair so gray?" "Tituba is almost a hundred years old; but she can see like a night-hawk, and hear like a fox. When her children want help, they will find her thought keen and her feet swift!" "But you shall work no more. I will save you from drudgery at least." "No, no. Let Tituba alone. She is used to it. Work--work--work. What would Tituba be without work? Let her plod on in the old way, Mahaska. The tree thrives best in its own soil. Dig honeysuckles and wild strawberries from the wood--plant them in your garden, and they grow. But when an old hemlock begins to die like this, let it stand--stir not the earth about its roots." The old woman touched her gray hair as she spoke, and drooped into her old position. Abby sat looking at her in tender astonishment. She could understand the great love which had brought that noble savage from the wilderness to be a drudge in her uncle's kitchen; it exalted the old, withered creature at her feet into a heroine. "And for our sakes you gave up your people, your free life, all that makes the happiness of a forest child; and came here to be a slave!" "Tituba only followed her child!" was the simple answer. "But Elizabeth Parris knew nothing of all this! To her you are only--" Abby broke off, for she felt that the truths she was about to speak were cruel. "I am only old Tituba to her, but she is all the world to me." "And yet you hate her father--her stern, kind-hearted father, for that the minister is." "He was your mother's judge before he became her father!" "And she is the grandchild of Anna Hutchinson, equally with myself!" said Abigail, musing. "But not the child of King Philip. Not the sister of the last chief of the Wampanoags, who now wanders like a wild beast through the lands his people once owned. She, my golden-haired child, is not the one who must avenge her grandmother's wrongs. From the beginning, she and her mother were like singing birds to be fed and cared for. You and your mother were eagles, with strength to swoop on their enemies and your own. Elizabeth must never know the events that are making your face so dark." "But why, why is the sunshine all for her, the darkness for me?" answered Abigail, with sorrowful bitterness. The old woman began to weave her hands together, and rock to and fro with a troubled look. "The eagle soars; the mocking-bird sings. One seeks her nest in the leaves, the other sits on the crags."