as very brief. He drove to the hotel and
put up for the night. During many sleepless hours his mind was in a
turmoil with a very different set of thoughts from those which had
occupied it on the way to town. Not the least of them was a profound
self-contempt for his own lack of discernment. How had he been so
blind as not to have read long ago the character of this wretched girl
who had bewitched him? To-night his eyes had been opened--he had seen
her with the mask thrown off, a true daughter of a race in which the
sensuous enjoyment of the moment took precedence of taste or sentiment
or any of the higher emotions. Her few months of boarding-school, her
brief association with white people, had evidently been a mere veneer
over the underlying negro, and their effects had slipped away as soon
as the intercourse had ceased. With the monkey-like imitativeness of
the negro she had copied the manners of white people while she lived
among them, and had dropped them with equal facility when they ceased
to serve a purpose. Who but a negro could have recovered so soon from
what had seemed a terrible bereavement?--she herself must have felt it
at the time, for otherwise she would not have swooned. A woman of
sensibility, as this one had seemed to be, should naturally feel more
keenly, and for a longer time than a man, an injury to the affections;
but he, a son of the ruling race, had been miserable for six weeks
about a girl who had so far forgotten him as already to plunge headlong
into the childish amusements of her own ignorant and degraded people.
What more, indeed, he asked himself savagely,--what more could be
expected of the base-born child of the plaything of a gentleman's idle
hour, who to this ignoble origin added the blood of a servile race?
And he, George Tryon, had honored her with his love; he had very nearly
linked his fate and joined his blood to hers by the solemn sanctions of
church and state. Tryon was not a devout man, but he thanked God with
religious fervor that he had been saved a second time from a mistake
which would have wrecked his whole future. If he had yielded to the
momentary weakness of the past night,--the outcome of a sickly
sentimentality to which he recognized now, in the light of reflection,
that he was entirely too prone,--he would have regretted it soon
enough. The black streak would have been sure to come out in some
form, sooner or later, if not in the wife, then in her children. H