Only on aunt Jemima’s countenance a grim satisfaction began to dawn. She was not an optimist; nevertheless she contrived to extract a drop of honey from all this wormwood. “It’s all fur the bes’—I’ve hearn that preached all my days. Ev’y body knowed ennyhow ez he war mean enough fur ennything—ter steal, ef ’casion riz. An’ he war her dad; couldn’t git roun’ that! All’s fur the bes’! Ef he hed hev stayed he mought hev tuk a notion ter kerry Rosamondy away from hyar. _Now_ he don’t dare ter show his nose hyar ag’in. An’ we hev got Rosamondy safe an’ sure fur good an’ all.” So she knitted on with a stern endorsement of the course of events expressed in her firmly-set lips and the decisive click of her needles. Even this view did not mitigate Abner’s grief, and he sorrowed on for Rosamondy’s sake. The secret of Keedon Bluffs once discovered was spread far and wide. The news, crossing the ranges, penetrated other coves, and was talked of round many a stranger’s hearth. Even to Persimmon Cove, where Jerry Binwell had married, the story came, albeit tardily. It was told first there by the sheriff, who had chanced to be called to that remote and secluded spot in pursuit of some evil doer hiding in the mountains, and he gave to the constable, as he passed through Tanglefoot Cove on his way to the county town, sundry items, gathered during his stay in Persimmon Cove, which that functionary felt it was his duty to communicate to the Guythers. It was a widow whom Jerry Binwell had married in Persimmon Cove—a young woman with one child; and when he left the place after her death, he took his stepdaughter with him; some people said his motive was to spite her grandmother, with whom he had quarreled, and who had sought to claim her; others said that it was because the little Rosamond contrived to keep a strong hold on the heart of every creature that came near her, and had even won upon Jerry Binwell. Certain it was that old Mrs. Peters, her grandmother, had heard with great delight the tidings of Rosamond’s whereabouts, and the sheriff had promised her to acquaint with the facts the family with whom the child lived. Every member of the household felt stunned as by a blow when the constable had left them to their meditations. Even Rosamond, with all her merry arts, could not win a smile from the grave and troubled faces grouped about the fire, and she desisted at last; she leaned her head, with its floating lengths of golden hair, against the brown logs of the wall, and looked wistfully at them all with a contemplative finger in her pink mouth. “She hev ter go!” said the upright Hiram Guyther with a sigh, “she ain’t ourn ter keep.” “We hev ter gin her up,” groaned the blind man. Mrs. Guyther looked wistfully at her with moist eyes, and dropped a half-dozen stitches in her knitting.