She looked up surprised. “Oh, has he? I thought he’d still be here. But what’s Rhoda crying about? Because he’s gone away so soon? Then why didn’t she keep him? She didn’t refuse him, did she?” “No, she didn’t give him a definite answer. And since he went away she has remembered that he is a slaveholder. You know how she and I feel about slavery.” Charlotte sprang to her feet excitedly. “You don’t mean to say she’s going to take that into account! I didn’t think she could be such a goose!” She looked up at him with twinkling eyes. “Father, why didn’t you take me down to Cincinnati with you, so he could have seen me first? Oh, well, I suppose he’ll come back again, won’t he?” And with a toss of her head she ran into the house, stopping at the door to throw back at him an audacious laugh. He gazed after her, an indulgent smile on his face. Did the look of her and the ring of her saucy laugh awaken some memory of the long ago wherein flitted another dainty, girlish figure so much like her that she sometimes startled him? At any rate, a still warmth took possession of his heart and drove out the slight resentment that just now crept in when his wife took Rhoda away to try to induce her to a course of action so directly opposed to his own convictions. CHAPTER VI “That’s just right, Rhoda.” Charlotte nodded at herself in the mirror and smiled with satisfaction as she turned this way and that, surveying her reflection at different angles. “I hope you won’t marry Jeff Delavan, for then I’d have to learn how to do this myself.” “You ought to learn how to make your own clothes, anyway,” her mother commented reprovingly. The three of them were in an upstairs chamber used as a sewing-room, Rhoda fitting upon her sister the bodice of a white gown and Mrs. Ware, between stitches as she darned a three-cornered tear in the muslin window curtain which the kitten had just made, looking on and making suggestions. Charlotte tossed her head and tilted her hoopskirts as she did some dancing steps in front of the mirror. “Oh, what’s the use, as long as Rhoda likes to sew and I don’t! You couldn’t, mother, when you were my age. I hope she won’t marry anybody as long as I’m at home. You’re an awful goose, Rhoda. Suppose Jeff Delavan is a slaveholder--what do you care about a pack of dirty niggers? They’re better off as slaves, anyway. Billy Saunders has lived in South Carolina and he says you couldn’t find anybody anywhere more contented and happy than the nigger slaves down South and that they’re no more fit to be free and take care of themselves than so many babies.” “Yes,” assented Mrs. Ware, “it has always seemed to me that they need white masters to provide for their welfare. They really are not competent to take care of themselves.” Rhoda listened to their talk as she adjusted a ruffled fichu about her sister’s shoulders, but made no comment. Nobody but she knew how wistfully, during these days, she was hearkening to arguments in favor of slavery.