and which had been a refuge to the ancestors of so many of them.
As she sat down she looked up at the wall and Harry's glance followed
hers. It was a long dining-room, and he saw there great portraits in
massive gilt frames. They were of people French in look, handsome,
and dressed with great care and elaboration. The men were in gay coats
and knee breeches, silk stockings and buckled shoes. Small swords were
at their sides. The women were even more gorgeous in velvet or heavy
satin, with their hair drawn high upon their heads and powdered.
One had a beauty patch upon her cheek.

Major St. Hilaire saw Harry's look as it sped along the wall. He smiled
a little sadly and then, a little cheerfully:

"Those are the ancestors of Madame Delaunay," he said, "and some,
I may mention in passing, are my own, also. Our gracious hostess and
myself are more or less distantly related--less, I fear--but I boast of
it, nevertheless, on every possible occasion. They were great people in
a great island, once the richest colony of France, the richest colony
in all the world. All those people whom you see upon the walls were
educated in Paris or other cities of France, and they returned to a life
upon the magnificent plantations of Hayti. What has become of that
brightness and glory? Gone like snow under a summer sun. 'Tis
nothing but the flower of fancy now. The free black savage has made a
wilderness of Hayti, and our enemies in the North would make the same
of South Carolina."

A murmur of applause ran around the table. Major St. Hilaire had spoken
with rhetorical effect and a certain undoubted pathos. Every face
flushed, and Harry saw the tears glistening in the eyes of Madame
Delaunay who, despite her fifty years, looked very handsome indeed in
her white dress, with the glittering gold fillet about her great masses
of hair.

The boy was stirred powerfully. His sensitive spirit responded at
once to the fervid atmosphere about him, to the color, the glow, the
intensity of a South far warmer than the one he had known. Their
passions were his passions, and having seen the black and savage Hayti
of which Major St. Hilaire had drawn such a vivid picture, he shuddered
lest South Carolina and other states, too, should fall in the same way
to destruction.

"It can never happen!" he exclaimed, carried away by impulse. "Kentucky
and Virginia and the big states of the Upper South will stand beside her
and fight with her!