She stopped suddenly and lifted her hand, staring with wildly dilated eyes at the nails of her finely shaped fingers to find if the telltale marks of negro blood were there which she had seen on Cleo's. Finding none, the horror in her eyes slowly softened into a look of despairing tenderness as she went on:
"The one passionate yearning of my soul has been to be a mother—to feel the breath of a babe on my heart, to hear it lisp my name and know a mother's love—the love I've starved for—and now, it can never be!"
She had moved beyond the table in her last desperate cry and Norton followed with a look of tenderness:
"Nonsense," he cried persuasively, "you're but a child yourself. You can go abroad where no such problem of white and black race exists. You can marry there and be happy in your home and little ones, if God shall give them!"
She turned on him savagely:
"Well, God shall not give them! I'll see to that! I'm young, but I'm not a fool. I know something of the laws of life. I know that Tom is not like you"—she turned and pointed to the portrait on the wall—"he is like his great-grandfather! Mine may have been——"
Her voice choked with passion. She grasped a chair with one hand and tore at the collar of her dress with the other. She had started to say "mine may have been a black cannibal!" and the sheer horror of its possibility had strangled her. When she had sufficiently mastered her feelings to speak she said in a strange muffled tone:
"I ask nothing of God now—if I could see Him, I'd curse Him to His face!"
"Come, come!" Norton exclaimed, "this is but a passing ugly fancy—such things rarely happen——"
"But they do happen!" she retorted slowly. "I've known one such tragedy, of a white mother's child coming into the world with the thick lips, kinky hair, flat nose and black skin of a cannibal ancestor! She killed herself when she was strong enough to leap out the window"—her voice dropped to a dreamy chant—"yes, blood will tell—there's but one thing for me to do! I wonder, with the yellow in me, if I'll have the courage."