Not knowing whether to be amused or indignant, I remained silent a moment.

Then I took a turn outside in the increasing darkness, listened to the now hurrying wind over the tree-tops, re-entered the cabin, closed the door, and went to bed.
But not to sleep.

Perhaps the responsibility towards these solitary children, which Johnson had so lightly shaken off, devolved upon me as I lay there, for I found myself imagining a dozen emergencies of their unprotected state, with which the elder girl could scarcely grapple.
There was little to fear from depredatory man or beast--desperadoes of the mountain trail never stooped to ignoble burglary, bear or panther seldom approached a cabin--but there was the chance of sudden illness, fire, the accidents that beset childhood, to say nothing of the narrowing moral and mental effect of their isolation at that tender age.
It was scandalous in Johnson to leave them alone.
In the silence I found I could hear quite distinctly the sound of their voices in the extension, and it was evident that Caroline was putting them to bed.

Suddenly a voice was uplifted--her own! She began to sing and the others to join her.

It was the repetition of a single verse of a well-known lugubrious negro melody.