And then there was a brief space of silence, each waiting for the other.
"I am here, you see," said the girl, finally, with an attempt at a smile. "And now will you give me the things I came for, as I cannot stay long?"
The negro tried to look at her, tried many times, but failed. His eyes shifted uneasily to all the other objects in the room, resting on none of them more than a second at a time.
"You wonder," he said, after another pause, "why I returned to America, why I came to your house last night. I thought I could tell you--this morning--and I have been trying to prepare myself to do so--but I cannot. You blame me a great deal, that is evident in every line of your face, but you do not know what I have suffered. Were your father to go to jail for the term the law prescribes, he would not endure the agony that has been mine."
"I am sorry, truly sorry for you," she replied. "But why could you not leave all your troubles, when you went to France, and begin an entirely new life? You found it true what I told you, I am sure, about the lack of prejudice--on account of your--race."
He nodded and cleared his throat before he spoke again.
"Oh, yes; but it is not the prejudice _there_ that worries me. It is the prejudice _here_. It is the barrier my color brings between me and the only being whose regard I crave!"
The girl's cheeks grew rosier than ever, but she affected not to understand, and once more reverted to the errand that had brought her thither.
"You promised me the documents with which my poor father has been tortured," she said, reproachfully; "let us not talk of other things until you have given them to me."
The negro drew from a pocket of his coat a fair-sized package tied with a ribbon.
"They are all there," he said. "Every scrap, every particle of proof, everything that could bring the breath of suspicion upon your father's honesty. All there, in that little envelope."
She reached for it, but instead of giving it to her, Hannibal caught her hand, and before she dreamed what he intended, pressed a kiss upon it. The next moment the girl, with a look of outraged womanhood, was rubbing the spot with her handkerchief, as if he had covered it with poison.
She could not find the word she wanted; nothing in the language she spoke seemed detestable enough to fill the measure of her wrong.