What Mary Bradford suffered before Saxe came we cannot know, but the measure of it lies, I think, in the resolution she took (if we believe the jealous slave girl) when she heard of the white man’s approach. She must have divined Saxe, leagues away, as he was unable to divine her, face to face. Her one intent was to deceive him, to steep herself in unrecognizable savagery. If Mary Bradford had conceived of any rôle possible for herself in her own world, she would not have created her great part. If she had felt herself fit even to care for lepers at Molokai, she would have washed away her paint and fallen at his feet. It is perfectly evident that she considered herself fit for nothing in life--hardly for death. Her hope was clearly that Saxe should not know her. I do not believe that it was pride. If there had been any pride left in Mary Bradford’s heart, she could not have stood quietly (“apathetically,” was his word!) before Saxe in the flare of the dying sun. It was not to save anything of hers that she went through her comedy, but only to save a little merciful blindness for Saxe himself. He undoubtedly made it as hard as possible for her. I am inclined to think that if he had gone away at once, she would be living still--mothering her half-breed child, teaching it secretly the fear of God. When she saw that all Saxe’s bewilderment still left him with the firm determination to buy her--to take her away and study her at his leisure--she conceived her magnificent _chute de rideau_. When she went into the hut, she had decided, for Saxe’s sake, to die. Mary Bradford grovelling at the feet of the drunken chief will always seem to me one of the most remarkable figures in history: I should never have mentioned Jocasta in the same breath with her. Only Christianity can give us tragedy like that. How must she not have longed, at Saxe’s offer of a kindly shot through the heart, to turn, to fling herself at his feet, to cry out his name, once. She “redoubled her caresses,” Saxe said! Has any man ever been so loved, do you think? For the sake of bestowing upon him that healing doubt, she let him go, she put off death, she spent her last night on earth not fifty yards from him, in the hut of a savage, that she might have, before dawn, the means of committing the unpardonable sin. Note that she did not commit suicide until she had made it perfectly plausible--from the point of view of the Arab-Mandingo woman. _She proved to him that it was not she._. She gauged Saxe perfectly. Nothing but some such evidence as later we received--perhaps not even that--would ever have made Saxe believe that Mary Bradford, with him by her side, had clung to that vile savage. Even Mary Bradford--whose soul must have been, by that time, far away from her body, a mere voice in her own ears, a remote counsellor to hands and feet--could not have done that, had she not intended to die. But remember that up to that day she had lived rather than rank herself with