The vague hope that she might prove weak and uninteresting had not been strengthened by the momentary sight of her face. The flash of joy that lighted her sensitive features, though it came across the lawn, had reached him with a very distinct impression of charm. He dreaded the effect at close range.
However, there was no other way. He had to see her and he had to make her stay impossible. It would be a staggering blow for a girl to be told in the dawn of young womanhood that her birth was shadowed by disgrace. It would be a doubly cruel one to tell her that her blood was mixed with a race of black slaves.
And yet a life built on a lie was set on shifting sand. It would not endure. It was best to build it squarely on the truth, and the sooner the true foundation was laid the better. There could be no place in our civilization for a woman of culture and refinement with negro blood in her veins. More and more the life of such people must become impossible. That she should remain in the South was unthinkable. That the conditions in the North were at bottom no better he knew from the experience of his stay in New York.
He would tell her the simple, hideous truth, depend on her terror to keep the secret, and send her abroad. It was the only thing to do.
He rose with a start at the sound of Tom's voice calling her from the stairway.
The answer came in low tones so charged with the quality of emotion that belongs to a sincere nature that his heart sank at the thought of his task.
She had only said the most commonplace thing—"All right, I'll be down in a moment." Yet the tones of her voice were so vibrant with feeling that its force reached him instantly, and he knew that his interview was going to be one of the most painful hours of his life.
And still he was not prepared for the shock her appearance in the shadows of the tall doorway gave. He had formed no conception of the gracious and appealing personality. In spite of the anguish her presence had brought, in spite of preconceived ideas of the inheritance of the vicious nature of her mother, in spite of his ingrained repugnance to the negroid type, in spite of his horror of the ghost of his young manhood suddenly risen from the dead to call him to judgment, in spite of his determination to be cruel as the surgeon to the last—in spite of all, his heart suddenly went out to her in a wave of sympathy and tenderness!
She was evidently so pitifully embarrassed and the suffering in her large, expressive eyes so keen and genuine, his first impulse was to rush to her side with words of comfort and assurance.
The simple white dress, with tiny pink ribbons drawn through its edges, which she wore accentuated the impression of timidity and suffering.