Harold and the babe soon fell asleep, and on reaching home were carried directly to bed; but the older ones begged so hard to be allowed to "stay with papa till mamma came home" that he could not find it in his heart to refuse them.
The Dinsmore party found Sophie devoting herself to her sick child; the attack had been sudden and severe, and all the previous night the mother had watched by the couch of the little sufferer with an aching heart, fearing she was to be taken from her; but now the danger seemed nearly over, a favorable change having taken place during the day.
Daisy had fallen into a quiet slumber, and leaving the nurse to watch at the bedside, the mother received and conversed with her friends in an adjoining room.
Though evidently very glad to see them, she seemed, after the first few moments, so depressed and anxious, that at length her sister remarked it, and asked if there were any other cause than Daisy's illness.
"Yes, Rose," she said, "I must own that I am growing very timid in regard to these Ku Klux outrages. Since they have taken to beating and shooting whites as well as blacks, women as well as men, who shall say that we are safe? I a Northern woman too and without a protector."
"I do not think they will molest a lady of your standing," said Mr. Dinsmore, "the widow too of a Confederate officer. But where is Boyd, that you say you are without a protector?"
A slight shudder ran over Sophie's frame. "Boyd?" she said, drawing her chair nearer and speaking in an undertone, "he is my great dread, and for fear of wounding mother's feelings I have had to keep my terrors to myself. I know that he is often out, away from the plantation, all night. I have for weeks past suspected that he was a Ku Klux, and last night, or rather early this morning, my suspicions were so fully confirmed that they now amount almost to certainty. I had been up all night with Daisy, and a little before sunrise happening to be at the window, I saw him stealing into the house with a bundle under his arm,—something white rolled up in the careless sort of way a man would do it."
"I am not surprised," said Mr. Dinsmore, "he is just the sort of man one would expect to be at such work,—headstrong, violent tempered, and utterly selfish and unscrupulous. Yet I think you may dismiss your fears of him, and feel it rather a safeguard than otherwise to have a member of the Klan in your family."
"It may be so," she said, musingly, the cloud of care partially lifting from her brow.
"And at all events you are not without a protector, dear sister," whispered Rose, as she bade adieu. "'A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows is God in his holy habitation.'"