“Why?”

“Oh!” I exclaimed.  “Need you have asked that?  The North won.”

“You are quite dispassionate!” Her eyes were always toward the window.

“That’s my ‘sacred trust.’”

It made her look at me.  “Yours?”

“Not yours—­yet!  It would be yours if you had won.”  I thought a slight change came in her steady scrutiny.  “And, Miss La Heu, it was awful about the negro.  It is awful.  The young North thinks so just as much as you do.  Oh, we shock our old people!  We don’t expect them to change, but they mustn’t expect us not to.  And even some of them have begun to whisper a little doubtfully.  But never mind them—­here’s the negro.  We can’t kick him out.  That plan is childish.  So, it’s like two men having to live in one house.  The white man would keep the house in repair, the black would let it rot.  Well, the black must take orders from the white.  And it will end so.”

She was eager.  “Slavery again, you think?”

“Oh, never!  It was too injurious to ourselves.  But something between slavery and equality.”  And I ended with a quotation:  “’Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards.’”

“You may call me cousin—­this once—­because you have been, really, quite nice—­for a Northerner.”

Now we had come to the place where she must understand me.

“Not a Northerner, Miss La Heu.”

She became mocking.  “Scarcely a Southerner, I presume?”

But I kept my smile and my directness.  “No more a Southerner than a Northerner.”

“Pray what, then?”

“An American.”

She was silent.

“It’s the ’sacred trust’—­for me.”

She was still silent.

“If my state seceded from the Union tomorrow, I should side with the Union against her.”

She was frankly astonished now.  “Would you really?” And I think some light about me began to reach her.  A Northerner willing to side against a Northern state!  I was very glad that I had found that phrase to make clear to her my American creed.

I proceeded.  “I shall help to hand down all the glories and all the sadnesses; Lee’s, Lincoln’s, everybody’s.  But I shall not hand ‘it’ down.”

This checked her.

“It’s easy for me, you know,” I hastily explained.  “Nothing noble about it at all.  But from noble people”—­and I looked hard at her—­“one expects, sooner or later, noble things.”

She repressed something she had been going to reply.

“If ever I have children,” I finished, “they shall know ‘Dixie’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’ by heart, and never know the difference.  By that time I should think they might have a chance of hearing ‘Yankee Doodle’ in Kings Port.”

Again she checked a rapid retort.  “Well,” she, after a pause, repeated, “you have been really quite nice.”

“May I tell you what you have been?”

“Certainly not.  Have you seen Mr. Mayrant to-day?”