Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Fantasy Football Challenge presents
Senator North

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after you returned; but I must wait till certain money comes in. I cannot live on what you so generously gave her. She would not go without me, and in spite of everything, I am almost ashamed to say, I have been very happy here--" "Is that all? I will go to my room now. Goodnight." She hurried upstairs, wishing she had a sleeping powder. As she closed the door of her room, the tall sombre figure of Harriet rose from a chair and confronted her. Betty hastily lit two lamps. She could not endure Harriet in a half light,--not while she wore black, at all events. "He has told me," she said briefly, answering the agonized inquiry in those haggard eyes. "I told him nothing." Harriet drew a long breath and swayed slightly. "Ah!" she said. Ah! Thank the Lord for that. I hope you will never have to go through what I have in this last half-hour." She seemed to recover herself rapidly, for after she had walked the length of the room twice, she confronted Betty with a tightening of the muscles of her face that gave it the expression of resolution which her features always had seemed to demand. "This is wholly my affair now," she said. "It is all between him and me. It would be criminal for you to interfere. When I realised I loved him, I made up my mind to marry him at once. I knew that you would not permit it, and although I hated to deceive you, I made up my mind that I would have my happiness. I intended to tell you when you got back, but after what you said to me that day I was scared you'd tell him. If you do--if you do--I swear before the Lord that I'll drown myself in that lake--" "I have no intention of telling him. As you say, it is now your own affair." "It is; it is. And although I may have to pay the price one day, I'll hope and hope till the last minute. I shall not let him return to America, and perhaps he will never guess. Somehow it seems as if everything must be right different over there, as if all life would look different." "You will find your point of view quite the same when you get there, for you take yourself with you. I'd like to go to bed now, Harriet, if you don't mind. I'm terribly tired." "I'll go. There is only one other thing I want to say. I shall have no children. I vowed long ago that the curse I had been forced to inherit should not poison another generation. Your cousin's line will die, undishonoured, with him. The crimes of many men will die in me. No further harm will be done if Jack never knows. And I hope and believe he never will. Good-night." XV Betty slept fitfully, her dreams haunted by Miss Trumbull's expression of outraged virtue surrounded by curl-papers. She rose at four, almost mechanically, rather glad than otherwise that she had some one with whom to talk over the events of the night. But although she admired Senator North the more for his distinguished contrast to Jack Emory, she felt as if all romance and love had gone out of her. Harriet's case was romantic enough in all conscience, and it was hideous. She met Miss Trumbull in the lower hall. Outraged virtue had given way to an expression of self-satisfied importance. "Well, I'm real glad they're married," she drawled. "It warn't in human nature not to listen, and I did--I ain't goin' to deny it, but I couldn't have slept a wink if I hadn't. Ain't you glad I told you?" "I certainly am not glad that you told me, and I wish I had dismissed you three weeks ago. When I return I shall give you a month's wages and you can go to-day." She hurried down to the lake and unmoored her boat. Her conscience was abnormally active this morning, and she reflected that she too was going to a tryst of which the world must know nothing. True, it was kept on the open lake and was as full of daylight as it was of impeccability, but it was not for the world to discover, for all that. She made no attempt to smile as Senator North stepped into the boat, and he took the oars without a word and pulled rapidly up the lake. When they were beyond all signs of human habitation, he brought the boat under the spreading limbs of an oak and crossed his oars. "Now," he said, "what is it? Something very serious indeed has happened." "Jack Emory and Harriet have been married three months." She filled in the statement listlessly and added no comment. "And your conscience is oppressed and miserable because you feel as if you were the author of the catastrophe," he replied. "What have you made up your mind to do?" It was evident that her attitude alone interested him, but he understood her mood perfectly. His voice was friendly and matter-of-fact; there was not a hint of the sympathizing lover about him. "It seems to me that as I did not act at the right time I only should make things worse by interfering now. As she said, it is a matter between her and him." "You are quite right. Any other course would be futile and cruel. And remember that you have acted wisely and well from the beginning. You have nothing to reproach yourself for. You brought the girl to your house for a period, because justice and humanity demanded it. The same principles demanded that you should keep her secret--for the matter of that your mother made secrecy one of the conditions of her consent. I had hoped that you would get rid of her before she obeyed the baser instincts of her nature. For she was bound to deceive some man, and her victim is your cousin by chance only. Have you noticed in Washington--or anywhere in the South--that a negro is always seen with a girl at least one shade whiter than himself? The same instinct to rise, to get closer to the standard of the white man, whom they slavishly admire, is in the women as well as in the men. They are the weaker sex and must submit to Circumstance, but they would sacrifice the whole race for marriage with a white man. If you had left this girl to her fate, she would have gone to the devil, for a woman as white as that would have starved rather than marry a negro. If you had given her money and told her to go her way, she would have established herself at once in some first-class hotel where she would be sure to meet men of the upper class. And she would have married the first that asked her and told him nothing. I am sorry that your cousin happens to be the victim, because he is your cousin. But if you will reflect a

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