"Are you sure that you saw and heard truly?" the minister said to Virgie.
"Oh, yes. I saw the same man at Mr. Milburn's the day he was taken sick. He looked at me a low, familiar look, and muttered something evil. Mary knew him too well. Oh, do not take me back to Princess Anne. I will never go there again."
"It may be true," Tilghman reflected. "It probably is true. Vesta has no faith in Allan McLane. She says he makes money in the negro trade, with all his religious formality. He is the trustee already of Mrs. Custis's estate; no doubt, the administrator by will. He may have sent Joe Johnson to kidnap Virgie, under color of his right, and Johnson would abuse anybody. Vesta will never forgive us if we let Virgie go to him."
"But I am a slave," Virgie sobbed. "Oh, my Lord! to think I am not Miss Vesta's, but a strange man's, slave. How could she give me away!"
"It was an error of judgment," Tilghman replied. "She could not anticipate her mother's immediate death. Yet there, where she thought you safest, you were most in peril."
They had now crossed the Dividing creek into Worcester County, and halted to cool the horses off at the same old spring, under the gum-tree, where Meshach Milburn stopped, the evening he went to the Furnace village.
"William," Rhoda Holland spoke, "if Virgie is McLane's slave you can't keep him from a-takin' her. She can't go back to Prencess Anne at all."
"I don't mean that she shall, Rhoda. I know you are a brave woman, and we will drive her to-night to Snow Hill, and leave her there with a nurse, a free woman, once belonging to my family, and this nurse has a husband who is said to be a conductor on what is called the Underground Road to the free states."
"Lord sakes! a Abolitionist?"
"I hope so," Tilghman said. "I know Vesta wants to set this girl free, and there is no way to do it, and respect her womanhood, but by giving her a wild beast's chance to run."