For a moment Mrs. Carteret stood gazing blankly at this faded slip of paper.  Her father had married this woman!—­at least he had gone through the form of marriage with her, for to him it had surely been no more than an empty formality.  The marriage of white and colored persons was forbidden by law.  Only recently she had read of a case where both the parties to such a crime, a colored man and a white woman, had been sentenced to long terms in the penitentiary.  She even recalled the circumstances.  The couple had been living together unlawfully,—­they were very low people, whose private lives were beneath the public notice,—­but influenced by a religious movement pervading the community, had sought, they said at the trial, to secure the blessing of God upon their union.  The higher law, which imperiously demanded that the purity and prestige of the white race be preserved at any cost, had intervened at this point.

Mechanically she moved toward the fireplace, so dazed by this discovery as to be scarcely conscious of her own actions.  She surely had not formed any definite intention of destroying this piece of paper when her fingers relaxed unconsciously and let go their hold upon it.  The draught swept it toward the fireplace.  Ere scarcely touching the flames it caught, blazed fiercely, and shot upward with the current of air.  A moment later the record of poor Julia’s marriage was scattered to the four winds of heaven, as her poor body had long since mingled with the dust of earth.

The letter remained unread.  In her agitation at the discovery of the marriage certificate, Olivia had almost forgotten the existence of the letter.  It was addressed to “John Delamere, Esq., as Executor of my Last Will and Testament,” while the lower left hand corner bore the direction:  “To be delivered only after my death, with seal unbroken.”

The seal was broken already; Mr. Delamere was dead; the letter could never be delivered.  Mrs. Carteret unfolded it and read:—­

MY DEAR DELAMERE,—­I have taken the liberty of naming you as executor of my last will, because you are my friend, and the only man of my acquaintance whom I feel that I can trust to carry out my wishes, appreciate my motives, and preserve the silence I desire.

I have, first, a confession to make.  Inclosed in this letter you will find a certificate of marriage between my child Janet’s mother and myself.  While I have never exactly repented of this marriage, I have never had the courage to acknowledge it openly.  If I had not married Julia, I fear Polly Ochiltree would have married me by main force,—­as she would marry you or any other gentleman unfortunate enough to fall in the way of this twice-widowed man-hunter.  When my wife died, three years ago, her sister Polly offered to keep house for me and the child.  I would sooner have had the devil in the house, and yet I trembled with alarm,—­there seemed no way of escape,—­it was so clearly and obviously the proper thing.