"What do you cry for, Katy Allen?" said the child, rather jealous that any other one should weep but her mother. "You have not got no pa, nor no husband out to sea."
"Oh, God help me! God forgive me! I haven't, I haven't," sobbed the beautiful girl, rocking to and fro on her chair.
Mrs. Mason checked her tears and looked on wonderingly. This strange outburst of grief almost irritated her, for, like her child, she rather craved a monopoly of suffering. All at once a wild apprehension seized upon her. What if Kate had heard--what if she knew that the brig had gone down with every soul on board, and had no strength to speak it out! Frightened by this new dread she started up and stood over the weeping girl.
"Tell me--tell me all you have heard," she almost shrieked. "If you don't want to see me drop dead at your feet, before the face of my child, speak out!"
Katharine looked up; amazement checked her tears, and the pupils of her beautiful eyes dilated.
"I have nothing to say, Mrs. Mason; I have not heard a syllable, how could I?"
"Does it make you angry, because I can't keep back the tears? Oh, it seems as if I could die, if any one would feel for me."
Mrs. Mason began to look serious, an old suspicion flashed across her mind. She was not a woman of much natural refinement, and the innate vanity of her nature more than compassion spoke out in her next words.
"Katharine, speak out--is it about Nelson Thrasher you are taking on so?"
The blood rushed over that white face like a sudden sunset, then the poor girl grew pale again, and purplish shadows came out under her eyes, leaving them, oh, how mournful.
"You need not look so frightened, Kate--there's no harm in it if you do love him, only you haven't got my spirit, that's all."
"What do I mean? why nothing worth mentioning." A peculiar curve of the handsome lip, as Mrs. Mason said this, made the young girl shiver from head to foot.
"Yes, but you have a meaning when you speak of my not having a spirit. Oh, tell me what it is!"
"Why nothing, Kate, only I thought you would have more pride than to take up with another woman's leavings."
"Another woman's leavings!" repeated Kate, all aghast; "another woman's leavings!"
"That was what I observed," answered Mrs. Mason, with a slight toss of the head. "Boasting isn't in my line, or I could point out a certain person who gave Nelse Thrasher his walking papers more than once, as if I would condescend to him, when his superior stood hat in hand."