Nevertheless, old friend, I will ask of you one favor.  If in the future this child of Julia’s and of mine should grow to womanhood; if she should prove to have her mother’s gentleness and love of virtue; if, in the new era which is opening up for her mother’s race, to which, unfortunately, she must belong, she should become, in time, an educated woman; and if the time should ever come when, by virtue of her education or the development of her people, it would be to her a source of shame or unhappiness that she was an illegitimate child,—­if you are still alive, old friend, and have the means of knowing or divining this thing, go to her and tell her, for me, that she is my lawful child, and ask her to forgive her father’s weakness.

When this letter comes to you, I shall have passed to—­the Beyond; but I am confident that you will accept this trust, for which I thank you now, in advance, most heartily.

The letter was signed with her father’s name, the same signature which had been attached to the will.

Having firmly convinced herself of the illegality of the papers, and of her own right to destroy them, Mrs. Carteret ought to have felt relieved that she had thus removed all traces of her dead father’s folly.  True, the other daughter remained,—­she had seen her on the street only the day before.  The sight of this person she had always found offensive, and now, she felt, in view of what she had just learned, it must be even more so.  Never, while this woman lived in the town, would she be able to throw the veil of forgetfulness over this blot upon her father’s memory.

As the day wore on, Mrs. Carteret grew still less at ease.  To herself, marriage was a serious thing,—­to a right-thinking woman the most serious concern of life.  A marriage certificate, rightfully procured, was scarcely less solemn, so far as it went, than the Bible itself.  Her own she cherished as the apple of her eye.  It was the evidence of her wifehood, the seal of her child’s legitimacy, her patent of nobility,—­the token of her own and her child’s claim to social place and consideration.  She had burned this pretended marriage certificate because it meant nothing.  Nevertheless, she could not ignore the knowledge of another such marriage, of which every one in the town knew,—­a celebrated case, indeed, where a white man, of a family quite as prominent as her father’s, had married a colored woman during the military occupation of the state just after the civil war.  The legality of the marriage had never been questioned.  It had been fully consummated by twenty years of subsequent cohabitation.  No amount of social persecution had ever shaken the position of the husband.  With an iron will he had stayed on in the town, a living protest against the established customs of the South, so rudely interrupted for a few short years; and, though his children were negroes, though he had never appeared in public with his wife, no one had ever questioned the validity of his marriage or the legitimacy of his offspring.