One morning as she was sitting on her front porch enjoying the morning breeze, she looked toward the gate and saw her husband entering. She screamed loudly, and rushed into her son's room and dragged him out of bed. She did not allow him time to dress, but was dragging him to the door.
Belton rushed into the house. Antoinette did not greet him, but cried in anxious, frenzied tones: "Belton! there is your white child! Look at him! Look at him!"
The boy looked up at Belton, and if ever one person favored another, this child favored him. Belton was dazed. He looked from child to mother and from mother to child. By and by it began to dawn on him that that child was somehow his child.
His wife eyed him eagerly. She rushed to her album and showed him pictures of the child taken at various stages of its growth. Belton discerned the same features in each photograph, but a different shade of color of the skin. His knees began to tremble. He had come, as the most wronged of men, to grant pardon. He now found himself the vilest of men, unfit for pardon.
A picture of all that his innocent wife had suffered came before him, and he gasped: "O, God, what crime is this with which my soul is stained?" He put his hands before his face.
Antoinette divined his thoughts and sprang toward him. She tore his hands from his face and kissed him passionately, and begged him to kiss and embrace her once more.
Belton shook his head sadly and cried: "Unworthy, unworthy."
Antoinette now burst forth into weeping.
The boy said: "Papa, why don't you kiss Mama?"
Hearing the boy's voice, Belton raised his eyes, and seeing his image, which Antoinette had brought into the world, he grasped her in his arms and covered her face with kisses; and there was joy enough in those two souls to almost excite envy in the bosom of angels.