“Why!  How strange!  The son? your grandfather? the radical, who married—­’Maud’?”

“Yes, the last slave he bought was for her.”

“Why, why, why!  He couldn’t have met her be’—­well—­before the year of Lincoln’s election.”

“No, let me tell you.  You remember ’Sidney’?”

“‘Maud’s’ black maid? my uncle’s Euonymus?  Yes.”

“Well, when she came to Maud, at Maud’s home, in the North, she was still in agony about Mingo, who’d been recaptured.  So Maud wrote South, to her aunt, who wrote back:  ’Yes, he had been brought home, and at creditor’s auction had been sold to a slave-trader to be resold here in New Orleans.’  So then Sidney begged Maud, who by luck was coming here, to bring her here to find him.”

“Brave Sidney.  Brave Euonymus.”

“Yes—­although—­her Southern mistress—­I know not how legally—­had sent to her her free-paper.  That made it safer, I suppose, eh?”

“Yes.  But—­who told you all this so exactly—­your grand’mere herself, or your grandpere?”

“Ah—­she, no.  I never saw her.  And grandpere—­no, he was killed before I was born.”

“What?”

“Yes, all that I’ll come to.  This I’m telling now is from my own papa.  He had it from grandpere. Grand’mere and Sidney came with friends, a gentleman and his wife, by ship from New York.”

“And all put up at Hotel St. Louis?”

“Yes.  From there Maud and Sidney began their search.  But now, first, about that speculating in slaves:  those two Theophiles, first the father, then both, hated slavery.  ’Twas by nature and in everything that they were radical.  Their friends knew that, even when they only said, ‘Oh, you are extreme!’ or ‘Those Chapdelaines are extremist.’  In those years from about eighteen-forty to ’sixty——­”

“When the slavery question was about to blaze——­”

“Yes—­they voted Whig.  That was the most antislavery they could vote and stay here.  But under the rose they said:  ’All right! extremist, yet Whig; we’ll be extreme Whig of a new kind.  We’ll trade in slaves.’”

Chester laughed.  “I begin to see,” he said, and by a sidelong glance bade Aline note the rapt attention of Cupid.  Her answering smile was so confidential that his heart leaped.

“I’ll tell you by and by about that also,” she murmured, and then resumed:  “While grandpere was yet a boy his father had begun that, that slave-buying.  On that auction-block he would often see a slave about to be sold much below value, or whose value might easily be increased by training to some trade.  You see?—­blacksmith, lady’s maid, cook, hair-dresser, engine-driver, butler?”

Chester darkened.  “So he made the thing pay?”

“Seem to pay.  Looking so simple, so ordinary, ’twas but a mask for something else.”

“But in a thing looking so ordinary had he no competitors, to make profits difficult?”