e at last deserted.

"He informed me as to how my secret came into his possession. Soon
after he committed his crime he felt sure that I was in possession
of his secret, and he thought to steal into my tent and murder me. He
stole in there one night to perpetrate the crime. I was talking in my
sleep. In my slumber I told the story of my secret marriage in such
circumstantial detail that it impressed him as being true. Feeling
that he could hold me with that, he spared my life, determined to
wound me deeper than death if I struck at him.

"You see that he is a cowardly villain; but we sometimes have to use
such.

"Now, my son, go forth; labor hard and climb high. Scale the high wall
of prejudice. Make it possible, dear boy, for me to own you ere I pass
out of life. Let your mother have the veil of slander torn from her
pure form ere she closes her eyes on earth forever."

Bernard, handsome, brilliant, eloquent, the grandson of a governor,
the son of a senator, a man of wealth, to whom defeat was a word
unknown, steps out to battle for the freedom of his race; urged to put
his whole soul into the fight because of his own burning desire
for glory, and because out of the gloom of night he heard his grief
stricken parents bidding him to climb where the cruel world would be
compelled to give its sanction to the union that produced such a man
as he.

Bernard's training was over. He now had a tremendous incentive. Into
life he plunges.

CHAPTER IX.

LOVE AND POLITICS.

Acting on his father's advice Bernard arrived in Norfolk in the course
of a few days. He realized that he was now a politician and decided
to make a diligent study of the art of pleasing the populace and to
sacrifice everything to the goddess of fame. Knowing that whom
the people loved they honored, he decided to win their love at all
hazards. He decided to become the obedient servant of the people that
he might thus make all the people his servants.

He took up hie abode at Hotel Douglass, a colored hotel at which the
colored leaders would often congregate. Bernard mingled with these men
freely and soon had the name among them of being a jovial good fellow.

While at Harvard, Bernard had studied law simultaneously with
his other studies and graduated from both the law and classical
departments the same year.

Near the city court house, in a row of somewhat dilapidated old
buildings, he rented a law office. The rowdy and criminal element
i