"Oh! yes, he went, pore ole soul, a-hobblin' off as sweet as a lamb with that snake in the grass!"
"Oh! black mammy, grandpa would not like you to speak that way of his son," cried Golden.
"I axes your pardon, honey. I spoke my mind afore I thought," answered Dinah.
"There is no offense as far as I am concerned," replied her young mistress, readily. "There is no love lost between my uncle and me."
Then she added, with a shade of anxiety in her voice:
"Will they be long gone, do you think?"
"I hasn't the leastest idea," said busy Dinah, "but ole massa is too feeble to walk very fur."
Golden turned away silently, and went to her grandfather's nook in the bay-window to await his return. She was burning with impatience to tell him the cruel and unkind things her cousins had said to her, and to ask if they were true.
She sat down in the old arm-chair, among the blossoming flowers, herself the fairest flower of all, and leaning her dimpled cheek on her hand, relapsed into troubled thought.
The strange relations sustained by her grandfather and herself toward his son's family puzzled her as it had often done before. Living in the same house, and nearly related as they were, there was little or no intercourse between the two families and they were barely friendly.