Well, I'm Jim Dawson, the nephew of L'Hommadieu, YOUR OLD MASTER!" She gripped the iron rail of the seat as if to leap from it, but checked herself suddenly and leaned back, with a set smile on her mouth that seemed stamped there.

It was remarkable that with that smile she flung away her old affectation of superciliousness for an older and ruder audacity, and that not only the expression, but the type of her face appeared to have changed.
"I don't say," continued the man quietly, "that he didn't MARRY you before he died.

But you know as well as I do that the laws of his State didn't recognize the marriage of a master with his octoroon slave! And you know as well as I do that even if he had freed you, he couldn't change your blood.

Why, if I'd been willing to stay at Avoyelles to be a nigger-driver like him, the plantation of 'de Fontanges'-- whose name you have taken--would have been left to me.

If YOU had stayed there, you might have been my property instead of YOUR owning a square man like Randolph.