“Hal does not care for us; he thinks we are dirt, and is ashamed to bring his fine friend here,” he said, as he handed the letter to his mother, who was scarcely less hurt and disappointed. “Yes, he’s ashamed of us,” Kenneth repeated to himself that night, as he went up to the _blizzardy_ north room, which never seemed to him quite so cold as it did now in the light of Harry’s criticism. “’Tis cheerless, that’s a fact,” Kenneth thought, as the wind went screaming past the house, driving before it a cloud of snow, some of which sifted in upon the bare floor through the shaky window. “Yes, ’tis cheerless and cold, and after all I don’t much blame Hal for wanting to go where a nigger makes a fire in the morning before he is up, but, by golly! he needn’t let ’em think father and mother are nigger aunties and uncles, and if I live I’ll show him somebody he nor forty Tom Hayneses won’t be ashamed of! Yes, I will!” The last words were said sleepily, for Kenneth’s head was on the pillow, and his last glimmer of consciousness was that he was to make something of himself of which his cousin would not be ashamed. CHAPTER III EXPECTING CONNIE When Deacon Stannard was in the army, the colonel of his regiment was Mark Elliott, whom, at the battle of Gettysburg, he found lying on his face among the dead and dying. At the risk of his own life he took him to a place of safety, and stayed by him till consciousness returned and he was able to be removed to a greater distance from the field of carnage. This act the colonel never forgot, and he became Ephraim’s fast friend, corresponding with him and visiting him once or twice at The 4 Corners. Then both men married and their lives drifted apart. The city man was busy on Wall Street, in New York, and Ephraim was busy on the farm which had come to him at his father’s death. Years went by and they heard nothing of each other, until there came to Ephraim, who was now a deacon, a letter from his friend, written in St. Augustine, where he had gone for his health.