“But,” and drawing nearer to him, Mildred looked wistfully in his face; “but what if I am somebody whom Lawrence mustn’t marry? Wouldn’t it be better to know it before it’s too late?”
“Heavens and earth, child,” returned the Judge. “Do you think anything can induce him to give you up. Wouldn’t you marry him if he was anything short of a nigger?”
This remark was suggestive, and Mildred chimed in:
“I’ll ask Rachel about that woman. She saw her, too.”
Hurrying off to the kitchen she found the old negress, whose story agreed exactly with Geraldine’s, except, indeed, that she described the stranger as worse-looking even than Miss Veille had done.
“I saw such a person in the avenue to-night,” said Luce, who was present, while her little child six years old testified stoutly to having seen a woman with a big bonnet in the lower hall.
“Thinks she’ll get some money,” growled the Judge, when Mildred repeated this to him; “but we’ll cheat her. If she knows who you are, let her come boldly and tell, and not entice you into the woods. There’s bedevilment somewhere.”
But all his efforts were fruitless to convince Mildred. The more she thought of it, the more excited she grew, and the more anxious she became to meet a person who could tell her of her parentage,—of her mother, maybe; the mother she had never known, but had dreamed of many and many a time.
“Go to bed,” the Judge said at last. “You’ll feel differently in the morning.”
Mildred obeyed so far as going to bed was concerned, but the morning found her more impatient than she had been the previous night, and not even Oliver, to whom she confided the story, had the power to quiet her. Go to the deserted hut she would, and if the Judge would not accompany her she would go alone, she said.