“And are you single now?” asked Mr. Green, addressing the lady.
“Yes,” she replied.
“This is indeed the Lord’s doings,” said Mr. Green, at the same time bursting into a flood of tears.
Although Mr. Devenant was past the age when men should think upon matrimonial subjects, yet this scene brought vividly before his eyes the days when he was a young man, and had a wife living, and he thought it was time to call their attention to dinner, which was then waiting. We need scarcely add that Mr. Green and Mrs. Devenant did very little towards diminishing the dinner that day.
After dinner the lovers (for such we have to call them) gave their experience from the time that George Green left the jail, dressed in Mary’s clothes. Up to that time Mr. Green’s was substantially as we have related it. Mrs. Devenant’s was as follows:
“The night after you left the prison,” she said, “I did not shut my eyes in sleep. The next morning, about eight o’clock, Peter, the gardener, came to the jail to see if I had been there the night before, and was informed that I had left a little after dark. About an hour after, Mr. Green came himself, and I need not say that he was much surprised on finding me there, dressed in your clothes. This was the first tidings they had of your escape.”
“What did Mr. Green say when he found that I had fled?”
“O,” continued Mrs. Devenant, “he said to me when no one was near, ‘I hope George will get off, but I fear you will have to suffer in his stead.’ I told him that if it must be so I was willing to die if you could live.”
At this moment George Green burst into tears, threw his arms around her neck, and exclaimed, “I am glad I have waited so long, with the hope of meeting you again.”
Mrs. Devenant again resumed her story: “I was kept in jail three days, during which time I was visited by the magistrates and two of the judges. On the third day I was taken out, and master told me that I was liberated upon condition that I be immediately sent out of the State. There happened to be, just at that time, in the neighborhood, a Negro-trader, and he purchased me and I was taken to New Orleans. On the steamboat we were kept in a close room where slaves are usually confined, so that I saw nothing of the passengers on board, or the towns we passed. We arrived at New Orleans, and were all put in the slave market for sale. I was examined by many persons, but none seemed willing to purchase me; as all thought me too white, and said I would run away and pass as a white woman. On the second day, while in the slave market, and while planters and others were examining slaves and making their purchases, I observed a tall young man with long black hair eyeing me very closely, and then talking to the trader. I felt sure that my time had now come, but the day closed without my being sold. I did not regret this, for I had heard that foreigners made the worst of masters, and I felt confident that the man who eyed me so closely was not an American.