I stared at her.

“Can’t you speak?” she cried, with a stamp of her foot. “At what am I valued? Ten pounds — fifty pounds” —

“At one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, madam,” I said dryly. “I will pay it myself. To what name upon the ship’s list do you answer?”

“Patience Worth,” she replied.

I left her standing there, and went upon my errand with a whirling brain. Her enrollment in that company proclaimed her meanly born, and she bore herself as of blood royal; of her own free will she had crossed an ocean to meet this day, and she held in passionate hatred this day and all that it contained; she was come to Virginia to better her