water-oak.

"Now we are safe," said the woman, throwing back her coarse shawl; "and
I tell you, Pierre, you must listen to me, and I _must_ speak, or some
day I shall just burst out and go screaming my dreadful news from one
end of the parish to the other."

The speaker was Marcelline, and the man who listened to her a huge
raw-boned mulatto of that square-jawed, vindictive-looking type which is
the manifest offspring of foul oppression and long-continued wrong.

But he shrank appalled from the tremendous energy of the woman beside
him. "Hush--sh!" he said in a warning whisper and with an apprehensive
glance into the still darkness around. "Don't talk so loud, you fool! or
I'll choke the d----d black blood out of you."

The woman lowered her voice, but paid no other heed to his menace as
she went on in the same earnestly-excited manner. "Listen, Pierre!" she
said, grasping him by the arm and speaking with an amount of decision
which even he could not withstand. "Do you love la bonne maitresse? Do
you care for her to live or die? Dis-moi, dis ce que tu veux!"

The man answered slowly, as if the words were forced from him against
his will, but still with an accent of truth and a certain amount of
energy: "Love her? Jesu! yes, I do love her. It seems drole for one of
us to talk about loving these cursed whites, who treat us worse than
dogs; but, for all that, I do love madame."

The woman almost shook him as she said in a whisper of concentrated
fury, "Who saved your life, Pierre Lambas, when you were perishing with
smallpox? Who went to New Orleans to buy your wife and children from a
cruel master and bring them here to you? Who watched by Sophie when she
was in convulsions?"

Her voice broke and her fingers relaxed their hold, but this time Pierre
answered without hesitation: "C'etait-elle, je le sais bien--I know it
well."

"Then," pursued Marcelline, "you are willing to stand by and see her
slowly murdered, inch by inch, by this white-faced devil, who leans over
her and professes to love her, but is killing her--_killing her_, Dieu
des dieux!--with hunger and thirst?" Her voice shook so that she could
scarcely speak as she concluded.

"How do I know," asked Pierre slowly, after a long pause, "that what you
think about this may not be a mistake?" Marcelline made an impatient
gesture, but he went calmly on: "They say Mons. Alphege is a good
doctor, and that he is fond of sa belle-mere. How can I take a man's