It was midnight, and the house was entirely silent and dark except where one shaded candle burned in the sick room. Down at the "quarters," as the negro cabins were called, every one was literally locked in slumber, and it must have been a loud and prolonged noise which should have awakened those tired sleepers. But some one was stirring, for all that, and had the moon been shining ever so faintly it would have been a dangerous task for those two gliding, crouching figures to move across the open green beyond the stable as they were doing. But the night was safely dark: a soft gray scud from the Gulf was flying rapidly in, obscuring even the dim starlight, and no one saw them as they passed through the turngate in the fence and sat down close to the water's edge under the overhanging trunk of a huge water-oak. "Now we are safe," said the woman, throwing back her coarse shawl; "and I tell you, Pierre, you must listen to me, and I _must_ speak, or some day I shall just burst out and go screaming my dreadful news from one end of the parish to the other." The speaker was Marcelline, and the man who listened to her a huge raw-boned mulatto of that square-jawed, vindictive-looking type which is the manifest offspring of foul oppression and long-continued wrong. But he shrank appalled from the tremendous energy of the woman beside him. "Hush--sh!" he said in a warning whisper and with an apprehensive glance into the still darkness around. "Don't talk so loud, you fool! or I'll choke the d----d black blood out of you." The woman lowered her voice, but paid no other heed to his menace as she went on in the same earnestly-excited manner. "Listen, Pierre!" she said, grasping him by the arm and speaking with an amount of decision which even he could not withstand. "Do you love la bonne maîtresse? Do you care for her to live or die? Dis-moi, dis ce que tu veux!" The man answered slowly, as if the words were forced from him against his will, but still with an accent of truth and a certain amount of energy: "Love her? Jesu! yes, I do love her. It seems drôle for one of us to talk about loving these cursed whites, who treat us worse than dogs; but, for all that, I do love madame." The woman almost shook him as she said in a whisper of concentrated fury, "Who saved your life, Pierre Lambas, when you were perishing with smallpox? Who went to New Orleans to buy your wife and children from a cruel master and bring them here to you? Who watched by Sophie when she was in convulsions?" Her voice broke and her fingers relaxed their hold, but this time Pierre answered without hesitation: "C'était-elle, je le sais bien--I know it well." "Then," pursued Marcelline, "you are willing to stand by and see her slowly murdered, inch by inch, by this white-faced devil, who leans over her and professes to love her, but is killing her--_killing her_, Dieu des dieux!--with hunger and thirst?" Her voice shook so that she could scarcely speak as she concluded.