Old Dinah looked at her almost sternly, and said abruptly:
"You must let him alone, Miss Golden, you have enamost kilt him now, with your badness and deceit."
"Black mammy, you shall not speak to me so," cried the girl, resentfully, and then the bright head drooped on the arm of the chair, and she wept bitterly, more from fright at the condition of her grandfather, than from any tangible sense of her own wrong-doing.
She loved her grandfather dearly, and the sight of his suffering stabbed her tender heart deeply.
While she wept silently, old Dinah busied herself in anxious cares for the old man.
He seemed frozen into a statue of despair, sitting with his head bowed forlornly, and his vacant eyes on the floor.
But quite suddenly he roused himself and looked around him with a heavy, hopeless gaze.
"Dinah, leave me alone," he said, with unwonted impatience. "I am not ill, or if I am it is with a sickness beyond mortal healing. Golden's disobedience and her cruel, undeserved reproaches have broken my heart."
Golden threw herself impulsively at his feet again.