“Why don’t the rest come?” it howled.  But the teachers tried in vain to inspire the panic-stricken girls with courage to face the mob, and were in despair, when a school official arrived, and with calm and confident authority bade the expelled girls gather in ranks and follow him through the crowd.  So they went out through the iron gates, the great leaves of which closed after them with a rasping of their key and shooting of their bolts, while a teacher said: 

“Come; the reporters will soon be here.  Let us go and see after Marguerite.”

They found her in the room of the janitress, shut in and fast asleep.

“Do you think,” one asked of the janitress, “that mere fright and the loss of that comb made this strong girl ill?”

“No.  I think she must have guessed those men’s errand, and her eye met the eye of some one who knew her.”

“But what of that?”

“She is ‘colored.’”

“Impossible!”

“I tell you, yes!”

“Why, I thought her as pure German as her name.”

“No, the mixture is there; though the only trace of it is on her lips.  Her mother—­she is dead now—­was a beautiful quadroon.  A German sea-captain loved her.  The law stood between them.  He opened a vein in his arm, forced in some of her blood, went to court, swore he had African blood, got his license, and married her.  Marguerite is engaged to be married to a white man, a gentleman who does not know this.  It was like life and death, so to speak, for her not to let those men turn her out of here.”

The teacher turned away, pondering.

The eviction did not, at that time, hold good.  The political struggle went on, fierce and bitter.  The “Radical” government was doomed, but not dead.  A few weeks after the scene just described the evicted girls were reinstated.  A long term of suspense followed.  The new year became the old and went out.  Twice this happened.  In 1877 there were two governors and two governments in Louisiana.  In sight from the belvedere of the “haunted house,” eight squares away up Royal street, in the State House, the de facto government was shut up under close military siege by the de jure government, and the Girls’ High School in Madame Lalaurie’s old house, continuing faithfully their daily sessions, knew with as little certainty to which of the two they belonged as though New Orleans had been some Italian city of the fifteenth century.  But to guess the White League, was not far from right, and in April the Radical government expired.

A Democratic school-board came in.  June brought Commencement day, and some of the same girls who had been evicted in 1874 were graduated by the new Board in 1877.  During the summer the schools and school-laws were overhauled, and in September or October the high school was removed to another place, where each pupil suspected of mixed blood was examined officially behind closed doors and only those who could prove white or Indian ancestry were allowed to stay.  A “colored” high school was opened in Madame Lalaurie’s house with a few pupils.  It lasted one session, maybe two, and then perished.