While this conversation was going on in the parlor, the two mothers of the young man were talking confidentially up stairs.  The intense curiosity which Mrs. Fitzgerald had formerly felt was at once renewed when Mrs. King said, “Do you remember having heard any one singing about the house and garden at Magnolia Lawn, the first evening you spent there?”

“Indeed I do,” she replied; “and when I first heard you in Rome, I repeatedly said your voice was precisely like that singer’s.”

“You might well be reminded of it,” responded Mrs. King, “for I was the person you heard at Magnolia Lawn, and these are the eyes that peeped at you through the lattice of the veranda.”

“But why were you there?  And why did you keep yourself invisible?” inquired Mrs. Fitzgerald.

Rosa hesitated a moment, embarrassed how to choose words to convey the unwelcome facts.  “My dear lady,” said she, “we have both had very sad experiences.  On my side, they have been healed by time; and I trust it is the same with you.  Will it pain you too much to hear something disparaging to the memory of your deceased husband?”

Mrs. Fitzgerald colored very deeply, and remained silent.

“Nothing but an imperious necessity would induce me to say what I am about to say,” continued Mrs. King; “not only because I am very reluctant to wound your feelings, but because the recital is humiliating and painful to myself.  When I peeped at you in your bridal attire, I believed myself to be Mr. Fitzgerald’s wife.  Our marriage had been kept strictly private, he always assuring me that it was only for a time.  But you need not look so alarmed.  I was not his wife.  I learned the next morning that I had been deceived by a sham ceremony.  And even if it had been genuine, the marriage would not have been valid by the laws of Louisiana, where it was performed; though I did not know that fact at the time.  No marriage with a slave is valid in that State.  My mother was a quadroon slave, and by the law that ’a child follows the condition of the mother,’ I also became a slave.”

“You a slave!” exclaimed Mrs. Fitzgerald, with unfeigned astonishment.  “That is incredible.  That goes beyond any of the stories Abolitionists make up to keep the country in agitation.”

“Judging by my own experience,” rejoined Mrs. King, “I should say that the most fertile imagination could invent nothing more strange and romantic than many of the incidents which grow out of slavery.”

She then went on to repeat her story in detail; not accusing Mr. Fitzgerald more than was absolutely necessary to explain the agonized and frantic state of mind in which she had changed the children.  Mrs. Fitzgerald listened with increasing agitation as she went on; and when it came to that avowal, she burst out with the passionate exclamation:  “Then Gerald is not my son!  And I love him so!”

Mrs. King took her hand and pressed it gently as she said:  “You can love him still, dear lady, and he will love you.  Doubtless you will always seem to him like his own mother.  If he takes an aversion to me, it will give me acute pain; but I shall try to bear it meekly, as a part of the punishment my fault deserves.”