l! girl!" cried Wilkins, striking his hand upon his brow
passionately, "why do you come to call all this up now?"

"Hear me, Bernard," said Minny, laying her hand again upon his arm. "You
must hear me out. My lips shall never call the past to your mind again,
never; but hear me now. I kept my place, and you kept yours. We met
clandestinely, when we could, and where we could; and when I found that
bondage kept me from your side, and that you had neither the gold to buy
me, nor the courage to have it said you bought your wife, then, then I
learned the bitter lot the quadroon has to bear. I was as white as you,
as free in heart and motion, with high and good impulses, and a
cultivated mind; and yet I had no liberty to go abroad, and make my home
with him I loved, and, for the first time in my life, I cursed the fate
which rendered me a slave! A little time went on, and what a change! Oh!
Heaven! that I should e'er have lived to see it! you grew cold and
distant as you rose in life, and when you gained the position you now
have here, I saw, because my very love made me see, that an ambitious
heart had turned your thoughts higher than the poor quadroon, the
beautiful but wretched slave. You loved my mistress! my master's
daughter! She whom he would rather this day bury in the Potter's field
than see your wife--and you know it! Oh! what agony then was mine! It
was my turn then to weep, and pray, and plead; was I not your lawful
wife, your own? Ha! what answer did you give me then? That our marriage
was a mere form, that it was illegal, and I was--what? No marriage could
be performed lawfully, you said, between a white man and a woman with
the blood of my race in her veins. I wonder that I did not go mad then;
I was taken terribly ill, but it was my fate to live on in misery. I
lived to see you and Miss Della meet often, after that first meeting at
the masked ball, and I lived to see her love you. When I found her
secret out, I gave you up for ever; and from that moment my love froze
up, and has hung in my heart like an unthawing icicle ever since."

"Have done, girl!" cried Wilkins, suddenly laying his heavy hands on her
shoulders, as she stood before him with the starlight she so loved, just
making her pale face and glittering eyes visible; "have done, I say, or
I will curse you. Hence! I have heard enough of this; why do you come
prating here, to tell me what I already know too well?--out upon you!"

In his impatient anger