In the three weeks that had elapsed Jack had not regained consciousness sufficiently to understand that Alagwa had left him. After he was better, Cato, fearing the effect of the news, kept it back until his master’s insistence grew too great to be longer denied. Jack received the information in bewildered silence. He could not understand it. Many of the happenings of that eventful evening had been blotted from his mind, but some of them remained fresh and clear. He remembered how the girl had fought against marrying him and how he had forced her to consent. But he remembered, too, that she _had_ consented and had married him, irrevocably and forever. Why, then, should she leave him an hour later? And whither had she gone? Vainly he questioned Cato. The negro had grown confused with anxiety, responsibility, and the lapse of time. “Deed I don’t know whar she went, an’ I don’t know why she went, Mars’ Jack,” he pleaded, “’c’epin’ it was somethin’ in the letter dat poor white trash read out to her.” Jack turned his head slightly. “Letter?” he echoed. “What letter? And who read it?” “Dat letter that Mars’ Rogers brought you from home. I don’t know who ’twas from but I reckons it was from ole marster. You was a-readin’ it when you dropped, and dat man Williams picks it up, and he reads somethin’ outer it, and Miss Bob’s face gets white and her eyes sorter pops and her mouth trimbles. Then she straightens up and turns her back on Williams and says for me to help her get you to bed. Then, after a couple of hours, when you’s restin’ sorter easy an’ the doctor done said you warn’t a-goin’ to be sick long she tells me she’s gwine away. She didn’t say whar she was gwine. She just went.” Jack had listened silently. He was still very weak. “What was it that Williams read?” he asked. Cato fairly groaned with the effort to remember. “Seems like I can’t exactly call it back, Mars’ Jack,” he confessed. “It was sumpin’ about somebody wanting you back home, but who ’twas I disremembers.” “Well, where is the letter?” Cato shook his head. “Deed I don’t know. Mars’ Jack,” he answered. “I ain’t seed it since. I looked for it the next day but I couldn’t find it an’ I ax Massa Rogers, but he say he don’t know nothin’ about it. I reckon it’s done lost.” “Go and find Rogers and ask him to come here.” While the negro was gone Jack lay quivering with excitement. He could not even remember that he had received a letter, much less what it contained. Cato’s words only added to his bewilderment. Naturally his people would want him at home, but he could not conceive how any statement to that effect could have troubled Alagwa, much less have caused her to leave him. The thought of Sally Habersham never once entered his mind.