prosper. And, in good time, whatever is desirable for us to know will be melted out of her, as inevitably as those tears which we see now.”

“At least,” remarked I, “you may tell us how and where you met with her.”

“An old man brought her to my lodgings,” answered Hollingsworth, “and begged me to convey her to Blithedale, where — so I understood him — she had friends; and this is positively all I know about the matter.”

Grim Silas Foster, all this while, had been busy at the supper-table, pouring out his own tea and gulping it down with no more sense of its exquisiteness than if it were a decoction of catnip; helping himself to pieces of dipt toast on the flat of his knife blade, and