I had a glorious time doing as I pleased." "And yet you've improved, seems to me," Aunt Eunice said.
"Oh, I'll turn out a polished dandy by and by, who knows ?" Hugh answered, laughingly; then helping his aunt to mount the horse which had brought her to Spring Bank, he returned to the house, which seemed rather lonely, notwithstanding that he had so often wished he could once more be alone, just as he was before his mother came.
On the whole, however, he enjoyed his freedom from restraint, and very rapidly fell back into his old loose way of living, bringing his dogs even into the parlor, and making it a repository for both his hunting and fishing apparatus.
"It's splendid to do as I'm mind to," he said, one hot August morning, nearly three weeks after his mother's departure.
"Hello, Mug, what do you want ?" he asked, as a very bright-looking little mulatto girl appeared in the door.
"Claib done buyed you this yer," and the child handed him the letter from his mother.
The first of it was full of affection for her boy, and Hugh felt his heart growing very tender as he read, but when he reached the point where poor, timid Mrs.Worthington tried to explain about Alice, making a wretched bungle, and showing plainly how much she was swayed by 'Lina, it began to harden at once.
"What the plague!" he exclaimed as he read on.

"Suppose I remember having heard her speak of her old school friend, Alice Morton?
I don't remember any such thing.

Her daughter's name's Alice--Alice Johnson," and Hugh for an instant turned white, so powerfully that name always affected him.
"She is going to Colonel Tiffton's first, though they've all got the typhoid fever, I hear, and that's no place for her.

That fever is terrible on Northerners--terrible on anybody.

I'm afraid of it myself, and I wish this horrid throbbing I've felt for a few days would leave my head.