During her weeks of unselfish devotion when she had played the role of the boy nurse so successfully, she had been purely and proudly glad. Now, little by little, a gulf had opened between them which to her unsophisticated mind could not be bridged. There lay the misery of the present time--she was nothing to him. Does any love resign its self-imposed tasks of delightful cares and happy anxieties without a pang? Like any other young untrained creature, she tormented herself with fears that were but shadows and railed at barriers which she herself had raised, even while she argued that Fate had fixed impassable chasms of race and caste between them. “How a man glories in war,” she said, after a silence, from her seat on a jagged rock overhanging the cliff. “You, with your Indian training, ought to feel with us and not think of fear,” said Warren. “But then, I am not of the blood.” “True.” His reply fell upon her ear like a reproach--a reflection upon her Negro origin. Her suspicion sounded in her voice as she replied: “Better an Indian than a Negro? I do not blame you for your preference.” “Why speak with that tone--so scornfully? Is it possible that you can think so meanly of me?” She could not meet his eye, but her answer was humbly given--her answer couched in the language of the tribes. “Are you not a white brave? Do not all of them hate the black blood?” “No; not all white men, thank God. In my country we think not of the color of the skin but of the man--the woman--the heart.” “Oh, your country! Do you know, I believe my dear papa was of the same?” Her head rested against the tree back of her; the lace-work of the pine ashes formed upon her knees and enveloped her as a cloud. He nodded in reply, and continued, musingly, as his eyes wandered off over the plain at his feet: “England is a country to die for--rich, grand, humane! You shall see it for yourself.” “Which is my country, I wonder? Judah says that he will not fight for the Stars and Stripes if war comes--the flag that makes the Negro a slave. This country mine? No, no! The fearful things that I have seen----” she broke off abruptly. “My father’s country shall be mine.” “Better reserve your decision until you marry.” “I shall never marry.” “But why?” asked Warren, opening his eyes in surprise. “Nonsense; all girls expect to marry, and do--most of them.” “I cannot marry out of the class of my father,” she replied, with head proudly erect. “It follows, then, that I shall never marry.” “Nonsense,” again returned Warren. “You will not live and grow old alone. Mere birth does not count for more than one’s whole training afterward, and you have been bred among another race altogether.” “But the degradation of the two years just passed can never leave me; life will never seem quite the same,” she said in a stifled voice full of pain. “I shall be a nun.” She ended with a little laugh, but the voice quivered beneath it.