son but some are vitriol and others just--Oh, well,
paregoric. Go out there and take another dose of that soothing
syrup labeled Susan Tomlinson, before I take you home, and
you--keep--away--from--vitriol--or--I'll--break--your--hot--young--
head. Vitriol, mind you!" With which command my Uncle, the General
Robert, strode down the hall in the direction of the smoking room and
left me blinking in the lights of the wide hall.

"Little Mas' Robert," came in a soft voice at my elbow as I stood
tottering, "is you got a picture of yo' mudder you could show Cato
some day when the General ain't lookin'. 'Fore I dies I wants to set
my eyes on de woman dat drawed little Mas' Henry away from us all. Dey
_is_ such a thing in dis hard old world as love what you goes
'crost many waters' to git, and he shorely got it." And I looked into
the eyes of that old black man to find a truth that all the white
humans about me, myself included, were acting in the terms of a lie.

Before I could answer the old man, in through the window came the
Gouverneur Faulkner and the beautiful Madam Whitworth, and from his
white face set in sternness and hers with its smile of the opening
rose upon its red mouth I could not tell whether his honor had been
slain or had been spared for another round.

"I'll want you in my office at the Capitol at eleven to-morrow,
Robert," he said to me, and there was a cold sternness in his glance
as they passed by me and the old Cato into the ballroom.

"At four," murmured the beautiful Madam Whitworth as she swept past me
with a soft smile but in a tone of voice too low for any ears save my
own and I think of the old Cato's.

For a very short moment the old black man detained me as he searched
one of the pockets of his long gray coat and then he handed to me a
tiny flat parcel apparently folded in some kind of thin red cloth.

"Wear that in your left shoe, honey, day and night. You'll need it if
she's got her eye on you," he said as he hurried away from me into the
smoking room.

After disrobing that night, or rather in the early morning of the
following day, I investigated the contents of that package. In it were
a gray feather off of an apparently very nice chicken, a very old and
rusty pin bent in two places and a flat little black seed I had never
before beheld.

I gazed at the package for several long moments, then I put back upon
my left foot the silk sock I had removed, placed the token of old Cato
within