She was tense with excitement, afraid. She could not dissociate this happening with the night through which she had passed. She dared not trust herself to tear open her own letter before these two women. Despairing, she turned to Miss Witherspoon who stood quiet, composed, just as one of her teachers would have stood at school. "Please tell me at once," she asked, "what this means?"
And Miss Witherspoon answered in a matter-of-fact tone such as a teacher might have used: "It seems, Hertha, that you are not colored but white."
The girl turned from one woman to another. "Don't mock me," she gasped.
"My darling!" Miss Patty held out her arms to her favorite. "There, dear, there, don't look so frightened, though I must say," glancing with scorn at her guest, "it would be enough to frighten any one into her grave to be told a piece of news that way. You are white, dear, and you have been left some money, and you ought to be very happy." And with many pats and kisses she told all of the story that she knew.
Hertha's letter was brief and ended by stating that she had been bequeathed two thousand dollars, and that, as all legacies left by the late George Ogilvie were to be paid at once, she was requested to come at her earliest convenience to the lawyer's office.
"What is she thinking about?" the two women asked themselves as the girl read her letter and said no word. But could they have looked into her mind they would have been perplexed to find an answer. Her brain was a blur of strange, magnificent impressions. A dying mother, an old man delaying restitution until after his death, money, freedom. As she looked down at her maid's dress, as she thought of herself last night crouched under the trees, she drew a deep breath. She was white, of good name. No one should play with her again and throw her away. In the multitude of emotions that rushed through her being the one that held her longest in its grip was pride. No white man now should expect her to give everything and in return receive only humiliation. "I'm white, I'm white," she repeated over and over to herself.
"Two thousand dollars is a good deal of money to get all at once, Hertha—or Miss Ogilvie, as I suppose I ought to say," Miss Witherspoon remarked, more to take Hertha's mind from herself than anything else. "I hope you'll use it wisely."
"Some of it," Hertha replied, "belongs to Mammy."
"She'll never touch it," Miss Patty said sharply; and in this she prophesied aright.
Hertha rose slowly and went into her mistress's bedroom.