Still, feeling toward her as I did, I was compelled to excuse her as best I might by attributing her hardness to an evil system now happily abolished.  But the nerves in my lost arm seemed to tingle with a secret satisfaction when I thought of Clem’s empty reward for his life-work and remembered that I had helped, though ever so little, to free him and his kind from a bond so unfortunate for each of the parties to it.

The winter deepened about us, chill and bleak and ravaging.  The smoke from our chimneys went up in tall columns that lost themselves in the gray sky.  The snow shut us in, and presently the wind lay in wait to blast us when we dared the drifts.

Yet Miss Caroline throve, despite her nostalgia.  She was even jaunty in her recital of the weather’s minor hardships.  To its rigors she brought a front of resolute gayety.  A new stove graced the parlor, a stove with the proud nickeled title of “Frost King”; a title seen to be deserved when Clem had it properly gorged with dry wood.  Within its tropic radiations Miss Caroline bloomed and was hale of being, like some hardy perennial.

Of Clem, nothing but hardiness was to be anticipated.  He had been toughened by four other of our winters, all said to have been unusual for severity.  And yet it was Clem, curiously enough, and not Miss Caroline, who found the season most trying.  True, he had to be abroad most of the time, procuring sustenance for the insatiable “Frost King,” or performing labor for other people by which Miss Caroline should preserve her independence; but it was not supposed that a creature of his sort could be subject to weaknesses natural enough to a superior race.

I believe this was his own view of the matter; for when he admitted to me one morning that he had “took cold in the chest,” his manner was one of deprecating confusion, and he swore me against betrayal of his lapse to Miss Caroline.

She discovered his guilt for herself, however, after a few days, from his very annoying cough.  She taxed him with it so sturdily that efforts at deception availed him not.  His tale that the snow sifted into his “bref-place” and “tickled it” was pitifully unconvincing, for his cough was deeper than Eustace Eubanks’s proudest note in the drinking song.

“He’s a worthless thing,” said Miss Caroline, telling me of his fault, and I said he was indeed—­that he hadn’t served me four years without my finding that out.  I added that he was undoubtedly shamming, but that at the same time it might be as well to take a few simple precautions.  Miss Caroline said that of course he was shamming, in order to get out of work, and that she would soon drive that nonsense out of his head if she had to wear the black wretch out to do it.  She added that she was about tired of his nonsense.

It may be known that I have heretofore lost no opportunity to foist all faults of understanding upon the heads of my fellow-townsmen.  And I should have liked to keep my record clear in that matter; but it would be uncandid to pretend, even at this late day, that I have ever divined the precise relationship that exists between Miss Caroline and her slave.  I may know a bit more of its intricacies than does Little Arcady at large, but not enough to permit that certain thrill of superior discernment which I have so often been able to enjoy in Slocum County.