ng?"

"Zillah, tell me truly, is this thing real? is the girl we call Lina
French your child?"

"Have I not said it," replied the woman, regarding him stealthily from
under her half-closed lashes. "Why should I attempt to deceive you? it
would gain me nothing."

"That is true; but how did it happen that you abandoned her?"

The woman lifted her face, with a sudden flush of the forehead--

"You sold me, made me another man's slave: me, me!" She paused, with a
struggle, as if some suppressed passion choked her; but directly her
self-possession returned; the flush died from her face, and she drooped
into her former attitude, looking downward as before. "But that I always
was--a slave, and the daughter of a slave. Your child, though unknown
and unacknowledged, better that it died than lived my life over again,
cursed with the proud Anglo-Saxon blood, debased by the African taint,
that, if it exists but in the slightest degree, poisons all the rest."

"Zillah, you speak bitterly. Was it my fault that you were born a slave
on the plantation of my friend; that your complexion was fair, and your
beauty so remarkable, that few men could have detected the shadows on
your forehead. Surely, you had no cause to complain of too much hardship
as my servant?"

For an instant, the haughty lip of the woman writhed like a serpent in
its venom, struggling to keep back the bitter words that burned upon
them. Then her face settled into comparative calm again, and she said,
in a tone of gentle reproach, "But you sold me!"

"I was compelled to it, Zillah. It was impossible to keep you on the
plantation. James Harrington became your owner on the death of his
mother, and you know how terribly he was prejudiced against you. It was
the only command that he made; everything else he left to me; but here,
here he was imperative. All that a kind and obliging master could do, I
accomplished in spite of him. You had your own choice of masters,
Zillah; that, at least, I secured to you."

"A choice of masters!" repeated the woman, turning pale with intense
feeling. "What did I care about a choice of masters, when you sold me?
Had you given me to the grave, it would have been Heaven to the years
that followed. You sold me without warning--coldly sent an order to the
agent, and I was taken away. Your own child was the slave of another
man."

"But you kept me in ignorance, Zillah; besides, I had been married
again. A northern man, I was, of cours