“Oh! that I had known sooner! I am an old fool! I might have suspected this and investigated Burton’s family. John Dunlap, d——n you for the old idiot that you are,” and rising he began pacing the floor; his brother watched him with eyes of tender, almost womanly affection until a suspicious moisture dimmed the sight of his worried second self. Going to him and taking him by the arm he joined him in his walk back and forth through the room, saying: “John, don’t worry yourself so much old chap, there is nothing to fear; what if there be a slight strain of negro blood in Burton? It will disappear in his descendants and even did Lucy know all that you have learned, she loves him and would marry him anyhow. You know her heart and her high sense of justice. She would not blame him and really it is no fault of his.” “You say,” broke in his brother, “that the negro blood will disappear in Burton’s descendants? That is just what may not happen! Both in the United States and Haiti I have seen cases of breeding back to the type of a remote ancestor where negro blood, no matter how little, ran in the veins of the immediate ancestor. In the animal kingdom see the remoteness of the five toed horse, yet even now sometimes a horse is born with five toes. Man is but an animal of the highest grade.” “Well, even granting what you say about the remote possibility of breeding back, you know that our ancestors years ago stood shoulder to shoulder with Garrison, Beecher and those grand heroes who maintained that the enslavement of the negro was a crime, and that the color of the skin made no difference—that all men were brothers and equal.” “Yes, I know and agree with our forefathers in all of that,” exclaimed the sun burned J. Dunlap with some show of impatience. “But while slavery was all wrong and equality before the law is absolutely right, still I have seen both in this country and in the West Indies such strange evidence of the inherent barbarism in the negro race that I am almost ready to paraphrase a saying of Napoleon and declare, ‘Scratch one with negro blood in him and you find a barbarian.’” “Your long residence in disorderly Haiti, where your health and our interest kept you has evidently prejudiced you,” replied the fair J. Dunlap. “Remember that for generations our family has extended the hospitality of our homes to those of negro blood provided they were educated, cultured people.” “Yes, James, Yes! Provided they had the culture and education created by the white man, and to be frank between ourselves, James, there has been much affectation about the obliteration of race distinction even in the case of our own family, and you know it! We Dunlaps have made much of our apparent liberality and consistency, but in our hearts we are as much race-proud Aryans as those ancestors who drove the race-inferior Turanians out of Europe.”