The thought of Betty came to him, but it brought no consolation. For himself he could meet the shipwreck standing, but Betty must be saved from it if there was salvation to be found. She had loved him in the days of his youth--in his strong days, as the Governor said--now that he was worn out, suffering, gray before his time, there was mere madness in his thought of her buoyant strength. “You may take ten--you may take twenty years to rebuild yourself,” a surgeon had said to him at parting; and he asked himself bitterly, by what right of love dared he make her strong youth a prop for his feeble life? She loved him he knew--in his blackest hour he never doubted this--but because she loved him, did it follow that she must be sacrificed? Then gradually the dark mood passed, and with his eyes on the star, his mouth settled into the lines of smiling patience which suffering brings to the brave. He had never been a coward and he was not one now. The years had taught him nothing if they had not taught him the wisdom most needed by his impulsive youth--that so long as there comes good to the meanest creature from fate's hardest blow, it is the part of a man to stand up and take it between the eyes. In the midst of his own despair, of the haunting memories of that bland period which was over for his race, there arose suddenly the figure of the slave the Major had rescued, in Dan's boyhood, from the power of old Rainy-day Jones. He saw again the poor black wretch shivering in the warmth, with the dirty rag about his jaw, and with the sight he drew a breath that was almost of relief. That one memory had troubled his own jovial ease; now in his approaching poverty he might put it away from him forever. In the first light of a misty April sunrise they went out on the road again, and when they had walked a mile or so, Big Abel found some young pokeberry shoots, which he boiled in his old quart cup with a slice of bacon he had saved from supper. At noon they came upon a little farm and ploughed a strip of land in payment for a dinner that was lavishly pressed upon them. The people were plain, poor, and kindly, and the farmer followed Dan into the field with entreaties that he should leave the furrows and come in to meet his family. “Let yo' darky do a bit of work if he wants to,” he urged, “but it makes me downright sick to see one of General Lee's soldiers driving my plough. The gals are afraid it'll bring bad luck.” With a laugh, Dan tossed the ropes to Big Abel, who had been breaking clods of earth, and returned to the house, where he was placed in the seat of honour and waited on by a troop of enthusiastic red-cheeked maidens, each of whom cut one of the remaining buttons from his coat. Here he was asked to stay the night, but with the memory of the blue valley before his eyes, he shook his head and pushed on again in the early afternoon. The vision of Chericoke hung like a star above his road, and he struggled a little nearer day by day.