sorry, truly sorry for you," she replied. "But why could you not
leave all your troubles, when you went to France, and begin an entirely
new life? You found it true what I told you, I am sure, about the lack
of prejudice--on account of your--race."

He nodded and cleared his throat before he spoke again.

"Oh, yes; but it is not the prejudice _there_ that worries me. It is the
prejudice _here_. It is the barrier my color brings between me and the
only being whose regard I crave!"

The girl's cheeks grew rosier than ever, but she affected not to
understand, and once more reverted to the errand that had brought her
thither.

"You promised me the documents with which my poor father has been
tortured," she said, reproachfully; "let us not talk of other things
until you have given them to me."

The negro drew from a pocket of his coat a fair-sized package tied with
a ribbon.

"They are all there," he said. "Every scrap, every particle of proof,
everything that could bring the breath of suspicion upon your father's
honesty. All there, in that little envelope."

She reached for it, but instead of giving it to her, Hannibal caught her
hand, and before she dreamed what he intended, pressed a kiss upon it.
The next moment the girl, with a look of outraged womanhood, was rubbing
the spot with her handkerchief, as if he had covered it with poison.

"You brute!" she exclaimed. "You--you--"

She could not find the word she wanted; nothing in the language she
spoke seemed detestable enough to fill the measure of her wrong.

"You see!" he answered, bitterly. "Because I am black I cannot touch the
hand of a woman that is white. You have claimed to be without the hatred
of the African so ingrained among Americans; you have talked about the
Almighty making of one blood all the nations of the earth; and yet you
are like the rest! A viper's bite could not have aroused deeper disgust
in you than my lips. And all because the sun shone more vertically on my
ancestors than it did on yours!"

Daisy was divided between her horror of the act he had committed and her
anxiety to do something to free her father from his danger. She
suppressed the hateful epithets that rose to her tongue and once more
entreated the negro to give her the packet he held in his possession.

"You can do nothing with it but injure a man who has been kind to you,"
she pleaded. "And if you use the information you have, and afterwards
repent, it will be too late