Her head rested against the tree back of her; the lace-work of the pine ashes formed upon her knees and enveloped her as a cloud.
He nodded in reply, and continued, musingly, as his eyes wandered off over the plain at his feet:
“England is a country to die for—rich, grand, humane! You shall see it for yourself.”
“Which is my country, I wonder? Judah says that he will not fight for the Stars and Stripes if war comes—the flag that makes the Negro a slave. This country mine? No, no! The fearful things that I have seen——” she broke off abruptly. “My father’s country shall be mine.”
“Better reserve your decision until you marry.”
“I shall never marry.”
“But why?” asked Warren, opening his eyes in surprise. “Nonsense; all girls expect to marry, and do—most of them.”
“I cannot marry out of the class of my father,” she replied, with head proudly erect. “It follows, then, that I shall never marry.”
“Nonsense,” again returned Warren. “You will not live and grow old alone. Mere birth does not count for more than one’s whole training afterward, and you have been bred among another race altogether.”
“But the degradation of the two years just passed can never leave me; life will never seem quite the same,” she said in a stifled voice full of pain. “I shall be a nun.” She ended with a little laugh, but the voice quivered beneath it.