“Your father seems perfectly infatuated with that low Irish boy.  Of course, I allude to Andy Burke.  He has gone so far as to give him a hundred dollars.  Yesterday, in riding home from Melville, with eight hundred dollars in his pocketbook, he says he was stopped by a highwayman, who demanded his money or his life.  Very singularly, Andy came up just in the nick of time with a gun, and made a great show of interfering, and finally drove the man away, as your father reports.  He is full of praise of Andy, and, as I said, gave him a hundred dollars, when two or three would have been quite enough, even had the rescue been real.  But of this I have my doubts.  It is very strange that the boy should have been on the spot just at the right time, still more strange that a full-grown man should have been frightened away by a boy of fifteen.  In fact, I think it is what they call a ‘put-up job.’  I think the robber and Andy were confederates, and that the whole thing was cut and dried, that the man should make the attack, and Andy should appear and frighten him away, for the sake of a reward which I dare say the two have shared together.  This is what I think about the matter.  I haven’t said so to your father, because he is so infatuated with the Irish boy that it would only make him angry, but I have no doubt that you will agree with me. [It may be said here that Godfrey eagerly adopted his mother’s view, and was equally provoked at his father’s liberality to his young enemy.] Your father says he won’t give you the ten dollars you asked for.  He can lavish a hundred dollars on Andy, but he has no money to give his own son.  But sooner or later that boy will be come up with—­sooner or later he will show himself in his true colors, and your father will be obliged to confess that he has been deceived.  It puts me out of patience when I think of him.

“We shall expect you home on Friday afternoon of next week, as usual.”

Andy was quite unconscious of the large space which he occupied in the thoughts of Mrs. Preston and Godfrey, and of the extent to which he troubled them.  He went on, trying to do his duty, and succeeding fully in satisfying the Misses Grant, who had come to feel a strong interest in his welfare.

Three weeks later, Sophia Grant, who had been to the village store on an errand, returned home, looking greatly alarmed.

“What is the matter, Sophia?” asked her sister.  “You look as if you had seen a ghost.”

“Just so, Priscilla,” she said; “no, I don’t mean that, but we may all be ghosts in a short time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Smallpox is in town!”

“Who’s got it?”

“Colonel Preston; and his wife won’t stay in the house.  She is packing up to go off, and I expect the poor man’ll die all by himself, unless somebody goes and takes care of him, and then it’ll spread, and we’ll all die of it.”

This was certainly startling intelligence.  Andy pitied the colonel, who had always treated him well.  It occurred to him that his mother had passed through an attack of smallpox in her youth, and could take care of the colonel without danger.  He resolved to consult her about it at once.