She seemed to submit; but her purpose of spending her all to recover any trace of her lost parent never wavered in her determined soul.  She had sold a string of pearls, and for the price, her faithful Hiram had been able first to make a long journey himself and then to send out a number of messengers into various lands.  By this time one at least might very well have reached home with some news, and she must see the freed-man.

But how could she get to him undetected?  For some minutes she stood watching and listening for a favorable moment for crossing the court-yard.  Suddenly a blaze lighted up a face—­it was Hiram’s.

At this moment the merry semi-circle laughed loudly as with one voice; she hastily made up her mind—­drew her kerchief closer over her face, ran quickly along the darker half of the quadrangle and, stooping low, hurried across the moonlight towards the slaves’ quarters.

At the entrance she paused; her heart throbbed violently.  Had she been observed?  No.—­There was not a cry, not a following footstep—­every dog knew her; the soldiers who were commonly on guard here had quitted their posts and were sitting with their comrades round the fire.

The long building to the left was the weaving shop and her nurse Perpetua lived there, in the upper story.  But even here she must be cautious, for the governor’s wife often came out to give her orders to the workwomen, and to see and criticise the produce of the hundred looms which were always in motion, early and late.  If she should be seen, one of the weavers might only too probably betray the fact of her nocturnal visit.  They had not yet gone to rest, for loud laughter fell upon her ear from the large sheds, open on all sides, which stood over the dyers’ vats.  This class of the governor’s people were also enjoying the cool night after the fierce heat of the day, and the girls too had lighted a fire.

Paula must pass them in full moonshine—­but not just yet; and she crouched close to the straw thatch which stretched over the huge clay water-jars placed here for the slave-girls to get drink from.  It cast a dark triangular shadow on the dusty ground that gleamed in the moonlight, and thus screened her from the gaze of the girls, while she could hear and see what was going on in the sheds.

The dreadful day of torture ending in a harsh discord was at end; and behind it she looked back on a few blissful hours full of the promise of new happiness;—­beyond these lay a long period of humiliation, the sequel of a terrible disaster.  How bright and sunny had her childhood been, how delightful her early youth!  For long years of her life she had waked every morning to new joys, and gone to rest every evening with sincere and fervent thanksgivings, that had welled from her soul as freely and naturally as perfume from a rose.  How often had she shaken her head in perplexed unbelief when she heard life spoken of as a vale of sorrows, and the lot of man bewailed as lamentable.  Now she knew better; and in many a lonely hour, in many a sleepless night, she had asked herself whether He could, indeed, be a kind and fatherly-loving God who could let a child be born and grow up, and fill its soul with every hope, and then bereave it of everything that was dear and desirable—­even of hope.