h relief, such satisfaction, that she
expected to end it in the tranquillity of Teackle Hall, like some young
eagle returned to her nest with abundant prey for the old birds there,
worn out with storm and time. In place of love and healing nature, Vesta
had found worldliness, resentment, intrigue, and aspersion, concluding
with a reference to the one object she feared and shrank from--the hat
of dark entail, the shadow upon her future life. Her eyes filled up, she
lisped aloud,

"I wish I had stayed with my husband!"

"Has he become so necessary to you already?" asked Mrs. Custis.

"He does appreciate my sacrifice," Vesta said, and her low sobs filled
the room. In a moment Virgie entered, alert to her playmate's pains, and
threw her arms around her mistress and kissed her like a child.

"Oh, missy," she spoke to Mrs. Custis, "to make her cry after what she
has done for all of us--to save your home, to save me from being sold!"

No scruples of race made Vesta reject this sympathy, precious to her
parched breast despite the quadroon taint as the golden sand in the
brooks of Africa, giving at once wealth and cooling. The slave girl's
long white arms, scarcely less pale than ivory--for she had slipped in
at the sign of sorrow, while making her simple toilet--drew Vesta into
her lap and laid her head upon the fair maiden shoulder, as if it was a
babe's. On such a shoulder, only a shadow darker, Vesta had often lain
in infancy, and sucked the milk that was sweet as Eve's--the common
fount of white and black--at the breast of Virgie's mother. That
faithful nurse was gone; the wild plum-tree grew upon her grave; but
Virgie inherited the motherly instinct and added the sisterly sympathy,
and her rich hair, half unbound, streamed down on Vesta's temples among
the dark ringlets there, while she looked into her own spirit for a word
to check those tears, and found it:

"People will say you have been crying, dear missy. The Lord knows you
did right. Don't let anybody make you lose your faith till your master,
your husband, does wrong to you; he wouldn't like to have you cry."

There was a nervous chord somewhere in the slave's throat that trembled
on the key of the heroic, and her nostrils, slightly rounded, her head,
free of carriage as the wild colt's, and a light from her soft eyes that
seemed to be reflected on their long, silken lashes, bore out a spirit
tamed by servitude, which still could kindle to everything that
con