"What shall you do?" answered the man, mimicking the gentle terror in the child's voice with a rough drawl of mockery. "What shall you do? why go to Jube, your father, and tell him to come here this instant! I'll teach him to send coffee like that to a gentleman's table. Bah, it's bitter as gall and thick as mud. Go call your father, I say."
"My father!" said the boy—"my father!" and his beautiful eyes were instantly flooded with tears.
"Yes, that nigger, Jube."
"But Jube is our slave, not my father."
"What! don't let me hear you tell that again or I'll give you a taste of the cat-o-nine-tails, no humbug with me, now I tell you."
The boy shrank back, but gleams of fire shot through the tears that still trembled in his eyes; he felt that the man was insulting him, but did not quite comprehend how.
"Go call your father, I say," repeated his tormentor.
"I'll call Jube if you want me to," said Paul, with the dignity of a little prince, "but if I were to call ever so long my father—oh, my father!—will never, never come."
The pale face of the child burned red as he began to speak, but it was pallid again before he closed, and his proud voice broke into sobs.
"Take that, and mind how you howl when I speak to you again," cried the tyrant, giving that pale cheek a blow with the palm of his hand.