His closing words again swept every
negro from his seat and melted every voice into a single frenzied shout:

"Within five years," he cried, "the intelligence and the wealth of this
mighty State will be transferred to the negro race. Lift up your heads.
The world is yours. Take it. Here and now I serve notice on every white
man who breathes that I am as good as he is. I demand, and I am going to
have, the privilege of going to see him in his house or his hotel, eating
with him and sleeping with him, and when I see fit, to take his daughter
in marriage!"

As the doctor emerged from the stifling crowd with his friend, he drew a
deep breath of fresh air, took from his pocket his conservative memorial,
picked it into little bits, and scattered them along the street as he
walked in silence back to his hotel.

CHAPTER IX

AT LOVER'S LEAP

In spite of the pitiful collapse of old Stoneman under his stroke of
paralysis, his children still saw the unconquered soul shining in his
colourless eyes. They had both been on the point of confessing their love
affairs to him and joining in the inevitable struggle when he was
stricken. They knew only too well that he would not consent to a dual
alliance with the Camerons under the conditions of fierce hatreds and
violence into which the State had drifted. They were too high-minded to
consider a violation of his wishes while thus helpless, with his strange
eyes following them about in childlike eagerness. His weakness was
mightier than his iron will.

So, for eighteen months, while he slowly groped out of mental twilight,
each had waited--Elsie with a tender faith struggling with despair, and
Phil in a torture of uncertainty and fear.

In the meantime, the young Northerner had become as radical in his
sympathies with the Southern people as his father had ever been against
them. This power of assimilation has always been a mark of Southern
genius. The sight of the Black Hand on their throats now roused his
righteous indignation. The patience with which they endured was to him
amazing. The Southerner he had found to be the last man on earth to become
a revolutionist. All his traits were against it. His genius for command,
the deep sense of duty and honour, his hospitality, his deathless love of
home, his supreme constancy and sense of civic unity, all combined to make
him ultraconservative. He began now to see that it was reverence for
authority as expressed in the Constitutio