"Yes, I am Vesta Milburn, your wife."
He seemed to remember, and, with compassion for him, she stooped and kissed him.
"God bless you!" he sighed, and passed away into the Upas shades again.
At that minute the mocking-bird flew in the open window and fluttered above the lowly bed, and perched upon the headboard and began to sing:
"'Sband! 'sband! see! see! Vesty, sweet! Vesty, sweet! Ha, ha! hurrah!"
Chapter XV.
THE KIDNAPPER.
It seemed to Judge Daniel Custis as he walked abroad into the Sunday sunshine, that he had never seen a more perfect day. The leaves were turning on the great sycamore-trees, and the maples along the rise in the road wore their most delicate garments of nankeen, while some young hickories, loaded with nuts, and a high gum-tree, splendid in finery, beckoned him out their way, across the Manokin bridge to the opposite hill, where the Presbyterian church overlooked the town.
The Judge, whose eyes were filled with happy tears, partly at the real relief to his circumstances accomplished by Vesta's great sacrifice, and partly by the scene just closed, of her natural honor and fidelity to the man who had forced her wedding vows from her, took the northern course and crossed the little bridge, and as he went up the hill the environs of the town and the town itself spread out behind him in the stillness of the Sabbath, and the quails and fall birds piped and cackled low in the corn and the grain stubble. Some wild-geese in the south flew over the low gray woods towards the bay; a pack of hounds somewhere bayed like distant music; he heard the turkeys gobble, at one of the adjacent farms on the swells in the marshy landscape, where abundance, not otherwise denoted, showed in the fat poultry that roosted in the trees like living fruit and spoke apoplectically.