Mr. Green would fain have excused himself, on the ground that they would expect him and wait at the hotel, but a look from the lady told him to accept the invitation. The old man was the father of Mrs. Devenant’s deceased husband, as you will no doubt long since have supposed. A fortnight from the day on which they met in the grave-yard Mr. Green and Mrs. Devenant were joined in holy wedlock; so that George and Mary, who had loved each other so ardently in their younger days, were now husband and wife. A celebrated writer has justly said of women: “A woman’s whole life is a history of affections. The heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul in the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless, for it is bankruptcy of the heart.” Mary had every reason to believe that she would never see George again; and although she confessed that the love she bore him was never transferred to her first husband, we can scarcely find fault with her for marrying Mr. Devenant. But the adherence of George Green to the resolution never to marry, unless to his Mary, is, indeed, a rare instance of the fidelity of man in the matter of love. We can but blush for our country’s shame, when we call to mind the fact, that while George and Mary Green, and numbers of other fugitives from American slavery, could receive protection from any of the governments of Europe, they could not in safety return to their own land until countless treasure, untold suffering and anguish, and the life blood of half a million men, had been paid as the price of the bondman’s chain. CHAPTER V. HOW SOL. JONES WAS LEFT. I. During the decade of the thirties, and for years afterward, there resided on an affluent of the Rappahannock, in Culpepper county, Virginia, one Solomon Jones. Mr. Jones was the inheritor of an estate with all that term would imply fifty years ago in the “Old Dominion”—numerous slaves, the F. F. V. idea of domination of race, and those false conceptions of right begotten of “chattel” ownership. Though naturally possessed of many excellent traits of character, he was harsh and unrelenting towards those who sustained to him the relation of property. On the little stream running through his domain he had erected a grist mill for his own accommodation and the profit to be derived therefrom in doing the work of his neighbors, and in supplying adjacent towns with the product of his mill; for Solomon had business tact and push far beyond his surroundings and time.