After Philip’s death, Margaret, as a sort of reparation in Philip’s name, conceives the idea of taking his illegitimate negro child, deserted by its mother, under her protection and care, so the little quadroon girl is brought to the Lawton home and placed in charge of Aunt Dilsey, the old mammy, who proclaims it her grandchild. There Viry is reared, playing with the Lawton children, sharing much of their life, but recognized as a “nigger” and treated on that basis. She is sent, as she grows older, to a negro college, where she learns rapidly, and finally comes back to the Lawtons and Aunt Dilsey, dissatisfied and embittered, frankly hating the race with which she is classed, but attached by the strongest affection to Bess Lawton, her half-sister. She becomes a teacher in a negro school, but holds herself aloof from the negroes, and grows more bitter and desperate. Bruce Carleton, the lover of Bess, is the object of her secret passion, and the savage, bestial strain in her make-up comes out in her plan to attract him and hold him in what to him would be a purely sensual tie. Finding out that Bess really loves him, however, she renounces her purpose, and, hopeless of happiness, tries to commit suicide. Then comes the culminating point of the book in the disclosure to Viry by Margaret of the secret of the former’s birth. Margaret lays bare her own suffering and her husband’s sin and makes a powerful appeal to the girl to accept her maimed and burdened life and make it in some measure an atonement and a redemption. Viry’s heart is reached at last, and she, too, bows to the master-word, Love, which means for her a life of service and loneliness. The race line must not be obliterated—this is made plain, and Mrs. Hammond’s argument is notably strong and unhackneyed. Margaret’s reply to Viry, when the latter, “the red blood burning in her face,” throws up to her the existence of three million mulattos as a proof that instinct is not against the union of black and white, is the most convincing and complete answer to that plea that has yet been presented.