"Has any one later intelligence than what I bring from my nephew's
bedside?"

So she hadn't perceived who my companion at the step had been! Well, she
should be enlightened, they all should be enlightened, and vengeance was

mine. I spoke with gentleness:--
"Your nephew's impressions, I fear, are still confused by his deplorable

misadventure."
"May I ask what you know about his impressions?"

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hand of Mrs. Trevise move toward
her bell; but she wished to hear all about it more than she wished

concord at her harmonious table; and the hand stopped.
Juno spoke again. "Who, pray, has later news than what I bring?"

My enemy was in my hand; and an enemy in the hand is worth I don't know
how many in the bush.

I answered most gently: "I do not come from Mr. Mayrant's bedside,
because I have just left him at the front door in sound health--saving a

bruise over his left eye."
During a second we all sat in a high-strung silence, and then Juno became

truly superb. "Who sees the scars he brazenly conceals?"
It took away my breath; my battle would have been lost, when the Briton

suggested: "But mayn't he have shown those to his Aunt?"
We sat in no silence now; the first et cetera made extraordinary sounds

on his plate, Mrs. Trevise tinkled her handbell with more unction than I
had ever yet seen in her; and while she and Daphne interchanged streams

of severe words which I was too disconcerted to follow, the other et
ceteras and the honeymooners hectically effervesced into small talk. I

presently found myself eating our last course amid a reestablished calm,
when, with a rustle, Juno swept out from among us, to return (I suppose)

to the bedside. As she passed behind the Briton's chair, that invaluable
person kicked me under the table, and on my raising my eyes to him he

gave me a large, robust wink.
X: High Walk and the Ladies

I now burned to put many questions to the rest of the company. If,
through my foolish and outreaching slyness with the girl behind the

counter, the door of my comprehension had been shut, Juno had now opened
it sufficiently wide for a number of facts to come crowding in, so to

speak, abreast. Indeed, their simultaneous arrival was not a little
confusing, as if several visitors had burst in upon me and at once begun

speaking loudly, each shouting a separate and important matter which
demanded my intelligentconsideration. John Mayrant worked in the custom

house, and Kings Port frowned upon this; not merely Kings Port in
general--which counted little with the boy, if indeed he noticed general

opinion at all--but the boy's particular Kings Port, his severe old
aunts, and his cousins, and the pretty girl at the Exchange, and the men

he played cards with, all these frowned upon it, too; yet even this
condemnation one could disregard if some lofty personal principle, some

pledge to one's own sacred honor, were at stake--but here was no such
thing: John Mayrant hated the position himself. The salary? No, the

salary would count for nothing in the face of such a prejudice as I had
seen glitter from his eye! A strong, clever youth of twenty-three, with

the world before him, and no one to support--stop! Hortense Rieppe! There
was the lofty personal principle, the sacredpledge to honor; he was

engaged presently to endow her with all his worldly goods; and to perform
this faithfully a bridegroom must not, no matter how little he liked

"taking orders from a negro," fling away his worldly goods some few days
before he was to pronounce his bridegroom's vow. So here, at Mrs.

Trevise's dinner-table, I caught for one moment, to the full, a vision of
the unhappy boy's plight; he was sticking to a task which he loathed that

he might support a wife whom he no longer desired. Such, as he saw it,
was his duty; and nobody, not even a soul of his kin or his kind, gave

him a word or a thought of understanding, gave him anything except the
cold shoulder. Yes; from one soul he had got a sign--from aged Daddy Ben,

at the churchyard gate; and amid my jostling surmises and conclusions,
that quaint speech of the old negro, that little act of fidelity and

affection from the heart of a black man, took on a strange pathos in its
isolation amid the general harshness of his white superiors. Over this it

was that I was pausing when, all in a second, perplexity again ruled my
meditations. Juno had said that the engagement was broken. Well, if that

were the case--But was it likely to be the case? Juno's agreeable habit,
a habit grown familiar to all of us in the house, was to sprinkle about,

along with her vitriol, liberal quantities of the by-product of
inaccuracy. Mingled with her latest illustrations, she had poured out for

us one good dose of falsehood, the antidote for which it had been my
happy office to administer on the spot. If John Mayrant wasn't in bed

from the wounds of combat, as she had given us to suppose, perhaps
Hortense Rieppe hadn't released him from his plighted troth, as Juno had

also announced; and distinctrelief filled me when I reasoned this out. I
leave others to reason out why it was relief, and why a dull

disappointment had come over me at the news that the match was off. This,
for me, should have been good news, when you consider that I had been so

lately telling myself such a marriage must not be, that I must myself,
somehow (since no one else would), step in and arrest the calamity; and

it seems odd that I should have felt this blankness and regret upon
learning that the parties had happily settled it for themselves, and

hence my difficult and delicateassistance was never to be needed by
them.

Did any one else now sitting at our table know of Miss Rieppe's reported
act? What particulars concerning John's fight had been given by Juno

before my entrance? It didn't surprise me that her nephew was in bed from
Master Mayrant's lusty blows. One could readily guess the manner in which

young John, with his pent-up fury over the custom house, would "land" his
chastisement all over the person of any rash critic! And what a talking

about it must be going on everywhere to-day! If Kings Port tongues had
been set in motion over me and my small notebook in a library, the whole

town must be buzzing over every bruise given and taken in this evidently
emphatic battle. I had hoped to glean some more precise information from

my fellow-boarders after Juno had disembarrassed us of her sonorous
presence; but even if they were possessed of all the facts which I

lacked, Mrs. Trevise in some masterly fashion of her own banished the
subject from further discussion. She held us off from it chiefly, I

think, by adopting a certain uprightposture in her chair, and a certain
tone when she inquired if we wished a second help of the pudding. After

thirty-five years of boarders and butchers, life held no secrets or
surprises for her; she was a mature, lone, disenchanted, able lady, and

even her silence was like an arm of the law.
An all too brief conversation, nipped by Mrs. Trevise at a stage even

earlier than the bud, revealed to me that perhaps my fellow-boarders
would have been glad to ask me questions, too.

It was the male honeymooner who addressed me. "Did I understand you to
say, sir, that Mr. Mayrant had received a bruise over his left eye?"

"Daphne!" called out Mrs. Trevise, "Mr. Henderson will take an orange."
And so we finished our meal without further reference to eyes, or noses,

or anything of the sort. It was just as well, I reflected, when I reached
my room, that I on my side had been asked no questions, since I most

likely knew less than the others who had heard all that Juno had to say;
and it would have been humiliating, after my superb appearance of knowing

more, to explain that John Mayrant had walked with me all the way from
the Library, and never told me a word about the affair.

This reflection increased my esteem for the boy's admirable reticence.
What private matter of his own had I ever learned from him? It was other

people, invariably, who told me of his troubles. There had been that
single, quickly controlled outbreak about his position in the Custom

House, and also he had let fall that touching word concerning his faith
and his liking to say his prayers in the place where his mother had said

them; beyond this, there had never yet been anything of all that must at
the present moment be intimatelystirring in his heart.

Should I "like to take orders from a negro?" Put personally, it came to
me now as a new idea came as something which had never entered my mind

before, not even as an abstract hypothesis I didn't have to think before
reaching the answer though; something within me, which you ma call what

you please--convention, prejudice, instinct--something answered most
prompt and emphatically in the negative. I revolved in my mind as I tried

to pack into a box a number of objects that I had bought in one or to
"antique" shops. They wouldn't go in, the objects; they were of defeating

and recalcitrant shapes, and of hostile materials--glass and brass--and I
must have a larger box made, and in that case I would buy this afternoon

the other kettle-supporter (I forget its right name) and have the whole