I have won you from your
father. Genifrede, how shall I distinguish myself? Show me the way,
and I shall succeed."

"Do not ask me," she replied, sighing.

"Nay, whom should I ask?"

"I never desired you to distinguish yourself."

"You do not wish it?"

"No."

"Not for your sake?"

"No."

And she looked around her with wistful eyes, in which her lover read a
wish that things would ever remain as they were now--that this moment
would never pass away.

"You would remain here--you would hide yourself here with me for ever!"
cried the happy Moyse.

"Here, or anywhere;--in the cottage at Breda;--in your father's hut on
the shore;--anywhere, Moyse, where there is nothing to dread. I live in
fear; and I am wretched."

"What is it that you fear, love? Why do you not trust, me to protect
you?"

"Then I fear for you, which is worse. Why cannot we live in the woods
or the mountains, where there would be no dangerous duties, and no
cares?"

"And if we lived in the woods, you would be more terrified still. There
would never be a falling star, but your heart would sink. You would
take the voices of the winds for the spirits of the woods, and the
mountain mists for ghosts. Then, there are the tornado and the
thunderbolt. When you saw the trees crashing, you would be for making
haste back to the plain. Whenever you heard the rock rolling and
bounding down the steep, or the cataract rising and roaring in the midst
of the tempest, you would entreat me to fly to the city. It is in this
little beating heart that the fear lies."

"What then is to be done?"

"This little heart must beat yet a while longer; and then, when I have
once come back, it shall rest upon mine for ever."

"Beside my father? He never rests. Your father would leave us in
peace; but he has committed you to one who knows not what rest is."

"Nor ever will," said Moyse. "If he closed his eyes, if he relaxed his
hand, we should all be sunk in ruin."

"We? Who? What ruin?"

"The whole negro race. Do you suppose the whites are less cruel than
they were? Do you believe that their thirst for our humiliation, our
slavery, is quenched? Do you believe that the white man's heart is
softened by the generosity and forgiveness of the blacks?"

"My father believes so," replied Genifrede; "and do they not adore him--
the whites whom he has reinstated? Do they not know that they owe to
him their lives, their homes, the prosperity of the i