A long time without a word they thus clung to each other. The sobs ceased at last.
"Now tell me, darling, how can I help you?" the gentle voice said.
"Oh, mamma, I just want to go home to you again and die—that's all."
"You'd be happier, you think, with me, dear?"
"Yes—it's clean and pure there. I can't live in this house—the very air I breathe is foul!"
"But you can't leave Dan, my child. Your life and his are one in your babe. God has made this so."
"He is nothing to me now. He doesn't exist. I don't come of his breed of men. My father's handsome face—my grandfather's record as the greatest Governor of the state—are not merely memories to me. I'll return to my own. And I'll take my child with me. I'll go back where the air is clean, where men have always been men, not beasts——"
The mother rose quietly and took from the mantel the dainty morocco-covered copy of the Bible she had given her daughter the day she left home. She turned its first, pages, put her finger on the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis, and turned down a leaf:
"I want you to read this chapter of Genesis which I have marked when you are yourself, and remember that the sympathy of the world has always been with the outcast Hagar, and not with the foolish wife who brought a beautiful girl into her husband's house and then repented of her folly."
"But a negress! oh, my God, the horror, the shame, the humiliation he has put on me! I've asked myself a hundred times why I lived a moment, why I didn't leap from that window and dash my brain out on the ground below—the beast—the beast!"