pop was killed, and all of us but me, who married a little Yankee girl what brought things to us prisoners in Washington.  She’s right smart younger than I am, and I’ve got eight children and five grandchildren, peart and lively as rabbits.  And you want me to swear that I seen Eudory married?  Wall, I will, for I did, and I’d like to see her girl—­Amy you call her.  Mabby Mary Jane an’ me will come to visit her when I have a spell off.’

“All this he said in a breath, and when I told him I was to marry Amy’s daughter, he called me his cousin, and asked when the wedding was to be.  If it had not been for those eight children and five grandchildren, thirteen Browns in all, which I felt sure he would bring with him, I should have promised him and Mary Jane an invitation.  As it was, I did nothing rash.  I got his affidavit, and we parted the best of friends, he urging me to call at his shanty and see Mary Jane and the kids.  I had to decline, but told him perhaps I’d bring my wife to see them.  What do you say?  Expect me to-morrow.

“Lovingly,

“JACK.”

CHAPTER XI

CONCLUSION

It did not take long for all Crompton to know that Amy was Col.  Crompton’s daughter, and that the Colonel had left a paper to that effect, which Mr. Howard had found, and that Eloise had also found the marriage certificate, proving her mother’s legitimacy beyond a doubt, and making her sole heir to the Crompton estate.  It was Friday night when the travellers returned from the South, and on Saturday morning, Mrs. Biggs’s washing day, she heard the news.  Leaving her clothes in the suds, and her tubs of rinsing and bluing water upon the floor, she started for the Crompton House, which she reached breathless with haste and excitement, and eager to congratulate Amy and Eloise.

“I swan, it ’most seem’s if I was your relation,” she said, shaking Eloise’s hand, and telling her she always mistrusted she was somebody more than common, “and I hope we shall be neighborly.  I s’pose you’ll live here?”

Eloise received her graciously, and said she should never forget her kindness, and told her some incidents of her journey, and, as Mrs. Biggs reported to Tim, “treated me as if I was just as good as she, if she is a Crompton.”

Ruby Ann came later in the day, genuinely glad for Eloise, and sure that nothing would ever change the young girl’s friendship for herself, no matter what her position might be.  Many others called that day and the following Monday, and Eloise received them with a dignity of which she was herself unconscious, and which they charged to the Crompton blood.  Howard, who was still suffering from a severe cold, kept his room until Jack returned.  Then he came out with a feeling of humiliation, not so much that he had lost the estate, as that he had thought to burn the paper which took it from him.  This feeling,