finest plantation in Westmoreland County for the echo of
Mary's voice or the music of Mary's footfall now.

Presently the door of Mary's room opened. The cold, unrelenting,
forbidding countenance of Miss Bettie, the nurse, confronted Lawrence's
upturned, pleading face.

"Oh, it 's _you_, is it?" said Miss Bettie, unfeelingly, and with this
cheerless remark she closed the door again, and Lawrence was more
miserable than ever. He stole down-stairs into a back room, escaped
through a window, and slunk away toward the stables. The whole world
seemed turned against him--in the flower of early manhood he found
himself unwillingly and undeservedly an Ishmaelite.

He rebelled against this cruel injustice.

Then he grew weak and childish again.

Anon he anathematized humanity, and then again he ruefully regretted
his own existence.

In a raging fever one moment, he shivered and chattered like a sick
magpie the next.

But when he thought of Mary his heart softened and sweeter emotions
thrilled him. She, at least, he assured himself, would defend him from
these persecutions were she aware of them. So, after roaming aimlessly
between the barn and the creek, the creek and the overseer's house, the
overseer's house and the swash, the swash and the grove, the grove and
the servants' quarters, Lawrence made up his mind that he 'd go back to
the house (like the brave man he wanted to make himself believe he was)
and help Mary endure "the ordeal," as Miss Dorcas Culpeper, spinster,
was pleased to term the event. But Lawrence could not bring himself to
face the feminine quartet in the front chamber--now that he came to
think of it he recollected that he always _had_ detested those four
impertinent gossips! So he crept around to the side window, raised it
softly, crawled in through, and slipped noiselessly toward the stairway.

Then all at once he heard a cry; a shrill little voice that did not
linger in his ears, but went straight to his heart and kept echoing
there and twining itself in and out, in and out, over and over again.

This little voice stirred Lawrence strangely; it seemed to tell him
things he had never known before, to speak a wisdom he had never
dreamed of, to breathe a sweeter music than he had ever heard, to
inspire ambitions purer and better than any he had ever felt--the voice
of his firstborn--you know, fathers, what that meant to Lawrence.

Well, Lawrence _was_ brave again, but there was a lump in h