"Then you are in the mood to talk to mother this morning," Vesta said, "while you have some unusual will and spirit. This resentful sullenness she is showing I fear more than your passing emotion, papa. Be firm, yet kind, with her, and I will go to find my husband. Yes, that is my place. He may be more justly complaining of my absence now, than we of his neglect."
"You don't mean that you are going to visit him at his den?"
"I shall go there first. It would have been my home last night if he had required it. To tell the truth," Vesta said, blushing, "the poor man was so kind to me yesterday, in spite of his object, and so quaint, and, as it seemed, dependent on me, that my charity is enlisted for him, and I could almost have married him from pity."
The Judge's temper fell a little in the study of his daughter's blushing.
"Wonderful! wonderful!" he thought to himself; "that poor corn-bred fellow has already made more impression on this girl's pride than a hundred cavalier gallants. Truly, we are a republic, Vesta," he continued aloud, "and you lay down the Custis character as easily as our old connection, Lord Fairfax, accepted the democracy of his hired surveyor, Mr. Washington, before he died."
"I laid down the Custis name yesterday," Vesta said, "though not their better character, I hope. Papa, there is only one law of marriage; it is where the wife follows the husband."
She looked a little archly at him, wiping her eyes of recent tears, and though she may not have meant it, he was reminded of his own fear of his wife.
Aunt Hominy now came in, having been told by Virgie to prepare coffee, and she followed Roxy, who brought it into the library. The old cook had a strange look, as of one who had been up all night at a fire, or a "protracted meeting," and she poked her head in as if afraid to come farther, till Vesta went out and kissed her kindly.
"Poor Aunty Hominy! did you think I was sold, or abused, because I had been married? Dear old aunty, I shall never leave you!"
Aunt Hominy had a countenance of profound, almost vacant, melancholy, mixed with a fear that, the Judge remarked, "he had seen on the faces of niggers that had stolen something."