eyes with an inscrutable expression in hers. "Have I not listened?" she
asked.

"But you have not answered," he urged, "you have not even tried to show me
wherein I am wrong."

The eyes whose sombre blackness had been like a veil now flamed with the
anger she had long repressed. "How little you understand me," she said
passionately, "when you think I can argue questions like these. You are
virtually asking what to me is sacrilege. I have listened to you
patiently, at what cost to my feelings you are incapable of knowing. Do
you think that I can forget that my grandfather was mangled to death, and
that his last words were, 'I was only trying to defend my home'? Do you
think I can forget that my father was trampled into the very earth by your
Northern friends with whom you must fraternize as well as trade? I will
not speak of my martyred mother. Her name and agony are too sacred to be
named in a political argument," and she uttered these last words with
intense bitterness. Then rising to end the interview, she continued coldly
in biting sarcasm, "Mr. Clancy, I have no relations with the North. I do
not deal in cotton, and none of its fibre has found its way into my
nature."

At these words he flushed hotly, sprang up, but by an evident and powerful
effort controlled himself, and sat down again.

"How could you even imagine," she added, "that words, arguments, political
and financial considerations would tempt me to be disloyal to the memory
of my dead kindred?"

"You _are_ disloyal to them," he said firmly.