I now left the alcove. Estelle knelt weeping with her face on the sofa. I touched her on the head, and she started up alarmed. She saw tears of sympathy on my cheek. I drew her away with my arm about her waist, and said, “Come! come and tell me all.” She let me lead her down-stairs into the parlor. I placed her in an arm-chair, and sat on a low ottoman at her feet. “Tell me all, Estelle,” I repeated. “What does it mean?” I then drew from her these facts. Her mother, though undistinguishable from a white woman, had been a slave belonging to a Mr. Huger, a sugar-planter. She was _reputed_ to be the daughter of what the Creoles call a _meamelouc_, that is, the offspring of a white man and a metif mother, a metif being the offspring of a white and a quarteron. This account of the genealogy of Estelle’s mother I never had occasion to doubt till years afterwards. The father of Estelle was Albert Grandeau, a young Parisian of good family. Being suddenly called home from Louisiana to France by the death of his parents, he left America, promising to return the following winter, and purchase the prospective mother of his child and take her to Paris. This he honestly intended to do; but alas for good _intentions_! It is good _deeds_ only that are secure against the caprices of Fate. The vessel in which Grandeau sailed foundered at sea, and he was among the lost. Estelle’s mother died in child-birth. And then Estelle,—on the well-known principle of Southern law, “_proles sequitur ventrem_,”—in spite of her fair complexion, was a slave. Mr. Huger dying, she fell to the portion of his unmarried daughter, Louise, who was a member of the newly established Convent of St. Vivia. She took Estelle, then a mere child, with her to bring up. Fortunately for Estelle, there were highly accomplished ladies in the convent, to whom it was at once a delight and a duty to instruct the little girl. French, English, and Italian were soon all equally familiar to her, and before she was seventeen she surpassed, in needlework and music, even her teachers. But the convent of St. Vivia had been cheated in the title of its estate; and through failure of funds, it was at length broken up. Soon afterwards, Louise Huger, whose health had always been feeble, died suddenly, leaving Estelle to her sister, Mrs. Dufour, with the request that measures should be at once taken to secure the maiden’s freedom, in the contingency of Mrs. Dufour’s demise. It was the failure of the latter to take the proper steps for Estelle’s manumission that now roused her anger and anxiety. These disclosures on the part of Estelle awoke in me conflicting emotions.