And after she left my side, Snow kissed her mamma and then went up to bid Victor good-night. She loved Victor, and he loved her dearly. And knowin’ it would be the last time he would ever have the chance agin most likely, he felt agitated and sorry, and took the dear little creeter up in his arms, dolly and all. As he did so I thought I heard the sound of steps in the garden, but I glanced out past Victor and couldn’t hear anything more, only that plaintive bird song, low, and strange, and thrillin’. And I kep’ on with my work. But agin we all thought we heard steps, and we listened for a minute, but everything wuz still. But sunthin’ drawed my eyes to look up at little Snow, and even as I looked a ball come crashin’ through the window and went right through that baby’s breast. Victor sprung to his feet and sez: “That wuz meant for me!” And as he looked down on Snow he cried out: “My God! has it killed the child?” But he laid her down on the lounge right by him, and, bold as a lion, and as if to shield us all from further harm, he sprang out on the piazza and from there to the ground, and faced the gang of masked men we could see surroundin’ him. But we couldn’t foller him with any of our thoughts; all of our hearts wuz centred on our little lamb. She lay there white as death where Victor put her. She lay there still, with her big blue eyes lookin’ up—up—and what did they see? Wuz the Form a bendin’ over her? We thought so, from her face—such a look of content, and understandin’, and comprehension of sunthin’ that wuz beyend our poor knowledge. For a minute she looked up with that rapt look on her face, and then she tried to lift her little white hand in that pretty gesture of greetin’ somebody we couldn’t see. And then she slowly turned her look onto all of us, full of love—love and pity; and then she wuz gone from us; we had only the beautiful little body left. We couldn’t believe it; we wuz stunned and almost killed with the suddenness of it, the terribleness, the onheard-of agony and pity of it. But it wuz so. When we had come to ourselves a little, and sent for the doctor, and worked over her, and wept over her till fur into the night, we had to believe it—dear little Snow had gone. Victor, full of thought for Genieve, for us all, led the gang away under a clump of magnolias in a distant part of the grounds, nigh to the little tomb of Belle Fanchon. They faced him, their faces full of brutal anger, and low envy, and all bad passions. Led on by the cruel lies and influence of Col. Seybert, and their own low distrust and dislike of superiority in one of their own class, their own besotted ideas of their personal freedom— They told Victor they would give him a chance for life. Let him give up his ideas of colonization, let him give up his plans of enrichin’ himself on the earnings of the poor, let him show he wuz one of his own people by goin’ back to his work again to Col. Seybert’s—they would give him this one chance.