The words danced and blurred before her eyes as she stared at them, all her attention indrawn to the pain in her breast. This, then, was all love meant to a man--the whim of a moment or a month, ready to be captured by the first pretty girl who made the effort. Had it not been the same with Horace Hardaker? Why should she have expected Jeff’s love to be of any more substantial fiber? And, moreover, what right had she to expect or wish him to be faithful to her? But her quivering heart cried out that if he had loved as she did he would have been faithful, even unto death. And down in the bottom of her soul she knew that her pain was not all for his lost love, that some of it, much of it, was for her ideal of his love and faith and chivalrous heart, stabbed to death by this immediate surrender to Charlotte’s allurements. “Miss Rhoda! Miss Rhoda! Miss Rhoda!” The frightened cry, repeated over and over, seeming at first to come out of some far-off space, pierced her indrawn consciousness. She looked up in a dazed way, her thoughts stumbling back slowly to her surroundings. Then she saw that Mary Ellen, between two men, was being hustled off the boat. She sprang after them and seized the arm of one of the men. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’ll soon find out what you’ve been doing!” the man replied. “This is an outrage!” Rhoda exclaimed. “Let this woman go, or I shall have you arrested! She is Miss Dunstable of Cincinnati, and is traveling with me. Let her go, I say!” The man laughed and pushed on. “No, she ain’t. She’s Lear White and she’s a slave and belongs to William H. Burns. I’m his agent and I was with him when he bought her and helped to take her and the rest of his gang to Louisville, where she give him the slip. I come up through this black abolition country to watch for her, and I knew her the minute I set eyes on her, though you have got her fixed up so fine.” With one sweep of his handkerchief across her cheek, he exposed a broad stripe of browner skin. He laughed contemptuously, and a number of others who had gathered round them on the landing laughed also. Rhoda heard the epithet, “nigger-thief,” in derisive tones passed from one to another. She knew well that if the crowd’s sympathies were with him there was no telling what it might do. Gripping his arm with both hands and bracing herself against his effort to move on, she faced about, head high and eyes flashing, and cried: “Is there no one here who will help me to save this poor girl?”