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Rh a furlough won him by a gunshot wound: and it was he who asked about old Jamie most anxiously.

"You feel sure that he was going to Havana?" said he over the family breakfast table.

Old lady Bowdoin had left them; long since she had established her claim to the donation fund by arriving always first at breakfast, and had devoted it, triumphantly, to a fund for free negroes,—"contrabands," as they were just then called. But Mrs. Bowdoin never had taken much interest in Mercedes.

"Sure, they were last heard of there. He was on some filibustering expedition in Cuba. Perhaps he was hanged. But no, I don't think so. Poor Jamie used to send them so much money!"

"He might have written before he sailed," said Harley, nursing his wounded arm.

"If he wrote, I guess he wrote to her," said Mr. Bowdoin dryly. "Why should he write to me?"

"I don't like it," said Harley.

Mr. Bowdoin did not like it; and not being willing to admit this to himself, it made him