Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/248

 *ment that she had made a mistake—she had gone too far. Alice's pale face flushed to the very temples, and all the passionate impulse of the temper she had inherited from her grandmother flashed back upon her from those startled eyes.

"Grandmother, it is not of Goody Nurse or her accusers that I am speaking," she said, controlling her rising temper with difficulty, "but of my father."

Goody Campbell made no answer, beyond an emphatic and contemptuous "Hump!"

"I ask you," said Alice, with her blue eyes wide open, and glittering like cut steel—"I ask you only to tell me about my father."

"An' I hae nathing to tell ye. Tak' yer answer, an' gang."

"I will not take that answer. You have told me about my mother a hundred times; then why not tell me something about my father?"

"I dinna ken ony thing aboot him—I hae nathing to tell ye. I hae na' seen him, or heard fra' him, sin' ye kim into the warld. What hae I to tell?"

"Neither have you seen nor heard from my