sh her every happiness, and remain,

Yours very truly,
GEORGE TRYON.

Warwick could not know that this formal epistle was the last of a dozen
that Tryon had written and destroyed during the week since the meeting
in Patesville,--hot, blistering letters, cold, cutting letters,
scornful, crushing letters. Though none of them was sent, except this
last, they had furnished a safety-valve for his emotions, and had left
him in a state of mind that permitted him to write the foregoing.

And now, while Rena is recovering from her illness, and Tryon from his
love, and while Fate is shuffling the cards for another deal, a few
words may be said about the past life of the people who lived in the
rear of the flower garden, in the quaint old house beyond the cedars,
and how their lives were mingled with those of the men and women around
them and others that were gone. For connected with our kind we must
be; if not by our virtues, then by our vices,--if not by our services,
at least by our needs.

XVIII

UNDER THE OLD REGIME

For many years before the civil war there had lived, in the old house
behind the cedars, a free colored woman who went by the name of Molly
Walden--her rightful name, for her parents were free-born and legally
married. She was a tall woman, straight as an arrow. Her complexion
in youth was of an old ivory tint, which at the period of this story,
time had darkened measurably. Her black eyes, now faded, had once
sparkled with the fire of youth. High cheek-bones, straight black
hair, and a certain dignified reposefulness of manner pointed to an
aboriginal descent. Tradition gave her to the negro race. Doubtless
she had a strain of each, with white blood very visibly predominating
over both. In Louisiana or the West Indies she would have been called
a quadroon, or more loosely, a creole; in North Carolina, where fine
distinctions were not the rule in matters of color, she was
sufficiently differentiated when described as a bright mulatto.

Molly's free birth carried with it certain advantages, even in the
South before the war. Though degraded from its high estate, and shorn
of its choicest attributes, the word "freedom" had nevertheless a
cheerful sound, and described a condition that left even to colored
people who could claim it some liberty of movement and some control of
their own persons. They were not citizens, yet they were not slaves.
No negro, save i