Suddenly the girl raised her head, with a flash of her eyes.
"What does God mean," she cried, fiercely, "by making such a difference in people?"
Roger's face became graver still.
"I can't tell you that, Lilly," he answered, soberly. "You'll have to ask the minister. But I've often thought of it myself. I suppose there is a reason, if we only knew. I guess all we can do is to begin where God has put us, and do what we can."
Lilly slowly gathered her disordered hair into one hand and pushed it behind her shoulders, her tear-stained eyes fixed sadly on the boy's troubled face.
The tea-bell, sounding from the distance, brought a welcome interruption, and Roger turned to go. He looked back when half across the meadow, and saw the little figure standing in relief upon a rocky hillock, the sun kindling her red locks into gold.
A few years previously, O'Connell had made his appearance in Ridgemont with wife and child, and had procured a lease of the run-down farm and buildings which had been their home ever since. It was understood that they had come from one of the Middle States, but beyond this nothing of their history was known.
The wife, a beautiful quadroon, sank beneath the severity of the climate, and lived but a short time. After her death, O'Connell, always a surly, hot-headed fellow, grew surlier still, and fell into evil ways. The child, with a curious sort of dignity and independence, took upon her small shoulders the burden her mother had laid aside, and carried on the forlorn household in her own way, without assistance or interference.
That she was not like other children, that she was set apart from them by some strange circumstance, she had early learned to feel. In time she began to comprehend in what the difference lay, and the knowledge roused within her a burning sense of wrong, a fierce spirit of resistance.