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She had gotten herself talked about. The sailors on the sea, the travellers along the highways, the women at their looms, they all gossiped about Leah, saying, "She is not within what her seeming is without. She appears to be pious, but if she were, she would not have deceived her sister."
'And do you know, ma'am, observed the girl breathlessly, 'something strange must have happened since last evening; for when I looked out of my window before six this morning I saw master standing before the door, and there was Leah, in her bonnet, speaking to him, and she went off with Pierson, wheeling off her boxes on his truck.
"I suppose it was because of your excellent Cyprus wine, to which my father has taken a great liking." "Ah! he like it? We will give him some." Leah was in a state of undress as before, and the sight of her half-covered spheres drove me to distraction. "Are you not aware that you have a beautiful breast?" said I. "I thought all young girls were just the same."
He pondered a whole day, and then sent an unsigned cablegram, addressed to the woman he had rebaptized as Rachel Meyer. It was the simple phrase, "Schebitz-Breslau." "Leah will know that I am here, and in any storm can join me." With a sudden access of generosity, he sent the faithful ally of his darkest day a secretly-purchased draft for two thousand marks.
Leah, whom she met at a store in the village, that the wedding was to take place at the house of the bride on Tuesday of the next week, and that on Thursday evening following, there was to be a grand party at Rose Hill, far exceeding in splendor and elegance the one given there some years before.
I'll hope on, even though disappointment come at last." The soliloquy ended, Leah laid away the pearls in the velvet-lined case, and turned to slumber and dreams.
Towards supper-time, in the middle of a square dance, Sam suddenly noticing Hannah's solitude, brought her a tall bronzed gentlemanly young man in a frock coat, mumbled an introduction and rushed back to the arms of the exacting Leah. "Excuse me, I am not dancing to-night," Hannah said coldly in reply to the stranger's demand for her programme.
That Jacob so regarded his handmaids, is proved by his curse upon Reuben, Gen. xlix. 4, and Chron. v. 1; also by the equality of their children with those of Rachel and Leah. But had it been otherwise had Laban given them as articles of property, then, indeed, the example of this "good old patriarch and slaveholder," Saint Laban, would have been a forecloser to all argument.
The other members of the household, viz., John and his wife, Leah the housemaid, and Sophie the French nurse, were decent people; but in no respect remarkable; with Sophie I used to talk French, and sometimes I asked her questions about her native country; but she was not of a descriptive or narrative turn, and generally gave such vapid and confused answers as were calculated rather to check than encourage inquiry.
Lizzie wept at the story, and when it was ended, she said lovingly, "Leah, dear, let me send for your father? I know he would come." "Alas! the chillness of death is upon me, and the thought of dying without his forgiveness is terrible! Would not his blessing dispel this awful gloom, dear Lizzie? Ah! a soul in the presence of its God is a helpless, pitiable thing!"
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