Mr. BOB PETERS lowered the hand holding the note until it rested heavily on his right knee, and gazed before him, as he sat on his couch, with a puzzled expression of countenance. He had been sitting in this way, perfectly motionless, for five minutes perhaps, when the door was gently pushed open a few inches, a dainty white hand came through the aperture, deposited a mysterious black bottle on the floor very softly, and disappeared as it came. In an instant, Mr. PETERS sprang to his feet, dashed the note to the ground, seized the bottle, and immediately applied it to his lips with great enthusiasm. His Mistress had understood that last subtle glance he gave her. With the wonderful insight of man's deeper nature peculiar to girls about eighteen years old, she had divined the one thing required to make the captive comfortable. Oh, woman, woman! In the language of a revised poet-- "Without the smile from partial beauty won, Ah, what were man!--a world without a son!" CHAPTER III.--THE WIDOW'S MITE. The ADAMSES resided in one of the aristocratic by ways crossing Main Street, and were directly descended from those distinguished and chivalric _anciens pauvres_ of the Old Dominion, who boasted the blood of the English cavaliers, and were a terror to their foes and creditors. ADAMS, the husband and father, was a fine specimen of the Southern gentleman in his day, possessing an estate in Louisa County, so completely covered with mortgages that no heir could get to it, and having won great fame by inventing an entirely new and singularly humorous oath for the benefit of a Yankee governess, when that despised hireling presumed to ask for a portion of her last year's salary. He might have lived to a green old age, but for the extraordinary joy he experienced at having negotiated a second mortgage on some property not worth quite half the first, which filled this worthy man with such exceeding great joy, that he drank rather more at a sitting than would start an ordinary hotel-bar, and died soon after of _delirium tremens_, as such noble and chivalric souls are very apt to do. The family left by the lamented ADAMS, consisting of a wife and one child--a daughter, at once assumed the most becoming style of mourning, moved in a funeral procession through society for six months, and then resigned themselves to the will of Providence with that beautiful cheerfulness which may either denote a high order of Christianity, or a low order of memory, as the case may be.