"And, dear friend--"
"Don't call me friend! I am not your friend! I am your lover!"
"No, let me call you friend, for that is all that I can call you at present. I should be sorry to hold a code of honour no higher than yours."
The slow, dark flush of pride and race rose in the man's fine face. Carolina was daring to say such words to a La Grange. But Carolina herself was a Lee.
"I should be sorry," said Carolina, deliberately, not waiting for his reply, "to be so narrow that I could refuse an offer to improve my land, denuded and mortgaged as it is,--an offer for the only rights I had left to sell, and which would give me plenty of money to enable me to restore the home of my ancestors,--simply because the syndicate furnishing the money was composed of Northern men, thus, for a senseless prejudice, compelling my mother and sister to eke out their income by sewing for negroes!"
Had Carolina struck him in the face, he could not have turned a whiter countenance upon her than he did. Twice he opened his lips to speak and twice closed them again with the futile words still unspoken. His hands were clenched at his side, his whole figure rigid with outraged pride. Yet he continued to look his accuser in the face, and Carolina honoured him for his courage even while she could see self-knowledge dawn and humiliation take the place of his dethroned pride. The first blow had been struck which was to unmask his pitiable attitude,--the attitude of the typical young Southerner of to-day, proud of his worn-out prejudices, and unaware that his very pride in them is in rags.
Carolina clasped her hands to hide their trembling. She could have cried out in pity for the suffering in the face of the man she loved, but she dared not speak one word of the sympathy her heart ached to show, for fear of undoing her work. Blindly she steeled herself for the words she feared would pour forth. Dully she wondered if, when they came, they would end everything between them, and preclude any possible overtures on her part when the leaven should have worked. But the words, bitter or otherwise, did not come. Still he simply stood and looked at her.
Then, with a gesture both graceful and dignified, he bent and took her hand and kissed it.
"I understand," he said, simply, and Carolina, turning away, albeit sick at heart, felt a dawning thrill of pride--her first--that she had come to love this man.
CHAPTER XXI.