_, call me here. I cannot go!"

She rose to her full height. "Then you are a murderer," she cried
wildly. "His blood be on your head, and a mother's curse beside!"

The next moment, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, she had thrown
herself at his feet,--at the feet of a negro, this proud white
woman,--and was clasping his knees wildly.

"O God!" she prayed, in tones which quivered with anguish, "pardon my
husband's sins, and my own, and move this man's hard heart, by the blood
of thy Son, who died to save us all!"

It was the last appeal of poor humanity. When the pride of intellect and
caste is broken; when we grovel in the dust of humiliation; when
sickness and sorrow come, and the shadow of death falls upon us, and
there is no hope elsewhere,--we turn to God, who sometimes swallows the
insult, and answers the appeal.

Miller raised the lady to her feet. He had been deeply moved,--but he
had been more deeply injured. This was his wife's sister,--ah, yes! but
a sister who had scorned and slighted and ignored the existence of his
wife for all her life. Only Miller, of all the world, could have guessed
what this had meant to Janet, and he had merely divined it through the
clairvoyant sympathy of love. This woman could have no claim upon him
because of this unacknowledged relationship. Yet, after all, she was his
wife's sister, his child's kinswoman. She was a fellow creature, too,
and in distress.

"Rise, madam," he said, with a sudden inspiration, lifting her gently.
"I will listen to you on one condition. My child lies dead in the
adjoining room, his mother by his side. Go in there, and make your
request of her. I will abide by her decision."

The two women stood confronting each other across the body of the dead
child, mute witness of this first meeting between two children of the
same father. Standing thus face to face, each under the stress of the
deepest emotions, the resemblance between them was even more striking
than it had seemed to Miller when he had admitted Mrs. Carteret to the
house. But Death, the great leveler, striking upon the one hand and
threatening upon the other, had wrought a marvelous transformation in
the bearing of the two women. The sad-eyed Janet towered erect, with
menacing aspect, like an avenging goddess. The other, whose pride had
been her life, stood in the attitude of a trembling suppliant.

"_You_ have come here," cried Janet, pointing with a tragic gesture to
the dead child,-