You must stay and wait upon her." "Ha!" was the quick response of the black, with a significant smirk upon his lip, and with a cunning emphasis; "enty I see; wha' for I hab eye ef I no see wid em?
I 'speck young misses hab no 'jection for go too--eh, Mass Ra'ph! all you hab for do is for ax em!" The eye of the youth danced with a playful light, as if a new thought, and not a disagreeable one, had suddenly broken in upon his brain; but the expression lasted but for an instant He overruled all the hopes and wishes of the sturdy black, who, at length, with a manner the most desponding, proceeded to the performance of the required duty.

A few moments sufficed, and with a single look to the window of his mistress, which spoke unseen volumes of love, leaving an explanatory letter for the perusal of father and daughter, though addressed only to the latter--he gave the rough hand of his sable friend a cordial pressure, and was soon hidden from sight by the thickly-spreading foliage of the long avenue.

The reader has been already apprized that the youth, whose escape in a preceding chapter we have already narrated, and Ralph Colleton, are one and the same person.
He had set forth, as we have seen, under the excitation of feelings strictly natural; but which, subtracting from the strong common sense belonging to his character, had led him prematurely into an adventure, having no distinct purposes, and promising largely of difficulty.

What were his thoughts of the future, what his designs, we are not prepared to say.

His character was of a firm and independent kind; and the probability is, that, looking to the profession of the law, in the study of which noble science his mind had been for some time occupied, he had contemplated its future practice in those portions of Tennessee in which his father had been known, and where he himself had passed some very pleasant years of his own life.