touched the pillow.
Then the maid who had undressed him beckoned the other in. Candle in
hand she led the way to the trundle-bed drawn out from under the Judge's
empty four-poster, and sat upon its edge. The child lay chest downward.
She lifted his gown, and exposed his back.

"Good Gawd!" whispered the other.

VII.

EXODUS

As Major Garnet's step sounded again in the hall, Barbara's crying came
faintly down through the closed doors. He found Ravenel sitting by the
lamp, turning the spotted leaves of Heber's poems.

"Mrs. Garnet putting Barb to bed?" he asked, and slowly took an easy
chair. His arm was aching cruelly.

"Yes." The young guest stretched and smiled.

The host was silent. He was willing to stand by what he had done, but
that this young friend with lower moral pretensions wholly approved it
made his company an annoyance. What he craved was unjust censure. "I
reckon you'd like to go up, too, wouldn't you? It's camp bedtime."

"Yes, got to come back to sleeping indoors--might as well begin."

On the staircase they met Johanna, with a lighted candle. The Major
said, as kindly as a father, "I'll take that."

As she gave it her eyes rolled whitely up to his, tears slipped down her
black cheeks, he frowned, and she hurried away. At his guest's door he
said a pleasant good-night, and then went to his wife's room.

Only moonlight was there. From a small, dim chamber next to it came
Barbara's softened moan. The mother sang low a child hymn. The father
sat down at a window, and strove to meditate. But his arm ached. The
mother sang on, and presently he found himself waiting for the fourth
stanza. It did not come; the child was still; but his memory supplied
it:

"And soon, too soon, the wintry hour
Of man's maturer age
May shake the soul with sorrow's power,
And stormy passion's rage."

He felt, but put aside, the implication of reproach to himself which lay
in the words and his wife's avoidance of them. He still believed that,
angry and unpremeditated as his act was, he could not have done
otherwise in justice nor yet in mercy. And still, through this right
doing, what bitterness had come! His wife's, child's, guest's--his
own--sensibilities had been painfully shocked. In the depths of a
soldier's sorrow for a cause loved and lost, there had been the one
consolation that the unasked freedom so stupidly thrust upon these poor
slaves was in certain aspects an emancipation t