me all about Virginia, you know--"

Here Colonel Musgrave frowned. "It is not a pleasant topic."

"You jay-bird, you behave entirely too much as if you were my
grandfather. As I was saying, Agatha told me all about your uncle and
Virginia," Patricia hurried on. "And how she ran away afterwards, and
hid in the woods for three days, and came to your father's plantation,
and how your father bought her, and how her son was born, and how her
son was lynched--"

"Now, really, Patricia! Surely there are other matters which may be more
profitably discussed."

"Of course. Now, for instance, why is the King of Hearts the only one
that hasn't a moustache?" Patricia peeped to see what cards lay beneath
that monarch, and upon reflection moved the King of Spades into the
vacant space. She was a devotee of solitaire and invariably cheated at
it.

She went on, absently: "But don't you see? That colored boy was your own
first cousin, and he was killed for doing exactly what his father had
done. Only they sent the father to the Senate and gave him columns of
flubdub and laid him out in state when he died--and they poured kerosene
upon the son and burned him alive. And I believe Virginia thinks that
wasn't fair."

"What do you mean?"

"I honestly believe Virginia hates the Musgraves. She is only a negro,
of course, but then she was a mother once--Oh, yes! all I need is a
black eight--" Patricia demanded, "Now look at your brother Hector--the
awfully dissipated one that died of an overdose of opiates. When it
happened wasn't Virginia taking care of him?"

"Of course. She is an invaluable nurse."

"And nobody else was here when Agatha went out into the rain. Now, what
if she had just let Agatha go, without trying to stop her? It would have
been perfectly simple. So is this. All I have to do is to take them off
now."

Colonel Musgrave negligently returned to his perusal of the afternoon
paper. "You are suggesting--if you will overlook my frankness--the most
deplorable sort of nonsense, Patricia."

"I know exactly how Balaam felt," she said, irrelevantly, and fell to
shuffling the cards. "You don't, and you won't, understand that Virginia
is a human being. In any event, I wish you would get rid of her."

"I couldn't decently do that," said Rudolph Musgrave, with careful
patience. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many years of
faithful service. Nothing more strikingly attests the folly of freeing
the negro than t