"Oh, then it isn't an elopement, but a legacy. Has the wicked but
wealthy relative died?"

"Yes," said Dorothy solemnly, her eyes on the floor.

"Oh, I am so sorry for what I have just said!"

"You always speak without thinking," chided her mother.

"Yes, don't I? But, you see, I thought somehow that Dorothy had no
relatives; but if she had one who was wealthy, and who allowed her to
slave at sewing, then I say he was wicked, dead or alive, so there!"

"When work is paid for it is not slavery," commented Sabina with
severity and justice.

The sewing girl looked up at her.

"My grandfather, in Virginia, owned slaves before the war, and I have
often thought that any curse which may have been attached to slavery
has at least partly been expiated by me, as foreshadowed in the Bible,
where it says that the sins of the fathers shall affect the third or
fourth generations. I was thinking of that when I spoke of the
shackles falling from my wrists, for sometimes, Miss Kempt, you have
made me doubt whether wages and slavery are as incompatible as you
appear to imagine. My father, who was a clergyman, often spoke to me
of his father's slaves, and while he never defended the institution, I
think the past in his mind was softened by a glamor that possibly
obscured the defects of life on the plantation. But often in
depression and loneliness I have thought I would rather have been one