and worthier woman. Even
his mother, a woman of keen discernment and delicate intuitions, had
been deceived by this girl's specious exterior. She had brought away
from her interview of the morning the impression that Rena was a fine,
pure spirit, born out of place, through some freak of Fate, devoting
herself with heroic self-sacrifice to a noble cause. Well, he had
imagined her just as pure and fine, and she had deliberately, with a
negro's low cunning, deceived him into believing that she was a white
girl. The pretended confession of the brother, in which he had spoken
of the humble origin of the family, had been, consciously or
unconsciously, the most disingenuous feature of the whole miserable
performance. They had tried by a show of frankness to satisfy their
own consciences,--they doubtless had enough of white blood to give them
a rudimentary trace of such a moral organ,--and by the same act to
disarm him against future recriminations, in the event of possible
discovery. How was he to imagine that persons of their appearance and
pretensions were tainted with negro blood? The more he dwelt upon the
subject, the more angry he became with those who had surprised his
virgin heart and deflowered it by such low trickery. The man who
brought the first negro into the British colonies had committed a crime
against humanity and a worse crime against his own race. The father of
this girl had been guilty of a sin against society for which
others--for which he, George Tryon--must pay the penalty. As slaves,
negroes were tolerable. As freemen, they were an excrescence, an alien
element incapable of absorption into the body politic of white men. He
would like to send them all back to the Africa from which their
forefathers had come,--unwillingly enough, he would admit,--and he
would like especially to banish this girl from his own neighborhood;
not indeed that her presence would make any difference to him, except
as a humiliating reminder of his own folly and weakness with which he
could very well dispense.

Of this state of mind Tryon gave no visible manifestation beyond a
certain taciturnity, so much at variance with his recent liveliness
that the ladies could not fail to notice it. No effort upon the part
of either was able to affect his mood, and they both resigned
themselves to await his lordship's pleasure to be companionable.

For a day or two, Tryon sedulously kept away from the neighborhood of
the school