“No!” said Toni, casting him a bewildered look. Putting the cloth on the table, the stranger responded: “By my way of thinking, no tyrannous act the whites committed could ever justify such a base and abominable betrayal. Such treachery,” he said, rising from the table with a pained expression, “undermined the wrath of God; the scandalized angels themselves will stand on the side of those who’d been unjustly treated and take up their cause to uphold the human and sacred order!” At these words he strode to the window and peered out at the storm clouds that covered the moon and stars; and since it seemed to him as if mother and daughter gave each other knowing looks, though he had not noticed them exchanging winks, he was left with an uneasy, downright queasy feeling; he turned around and asked to be led to his room to catch up on lost sleep.

Turning to the wall clock, the mother noticed that it was going on midnight, took a candle in her hand and motioned for the stranger to follow. She led him down long corridors to the room she’d readied for him; Toni carried the stranger’s overcoat and the other things he’d removed; the mother showed him to his bed piled up with comfortable pillows, and after telling Toni to give him a footbath, bid him goodnight and took her leave. The stranger set his sword in the corner and plucked a pair of pistols out of his belt and lay them on the table. While Toni shoved the bed forward and covered it with a white sheet, he looked around the room; and since he concluded from the luxury and taste of the decor that these furnishings must have belonged to the former owner of the plantation, a feeling of trepidation hovered like a vulture round his heart, and he wished himself, hungry and thirsty as he’d come, back in the woods with his relations. The girl had meanwhile fetched a vessel filled with warm, sweet-scented water from the adjoining kitchen, and bid the officer, who had been leaning at the window, to come refresh himself. Silently shedding scarf and vest, he sank into a chair to bear his feet, and while the girl knelt down before him, busying herself with all the small preparations for the bath, he gazed at her fetching figure. As she knelt down her hair fell in dark billowing curls on her young breasts; a disarming comeliness played upon her lips and graced the long eyelashes that fell upon her downcast eyes; he could have sworn, except for her skin color, which he found objectionable, that he had never set eyes on anything as lovely. Watching her now, he was once again struck, as he had been at first sight of her at the door, by a vague resemblance she bore to someone, though he could not say to whom, and the impression overwhelmed him body and soul. He reached for her hand as, all her preparations completed, she rose from the floor, and since he accurately gauged that there was but one way to test if the girl had a heart, he pulled her down on his lap and asked: “Are you already betrothed to a fiancé?” “No!” the girl said in a hushed voice, casting her big black eyes to the ground with a stunning modesty. And without budging from his lap, she added: “Connelly, the young Negro from the neighboring plantation, did propose to me three months ago, but I declined because I was too young.” The stranger, who with both his hands now grasped her slender body, said: “Where I come from, as the saying goes, at fourteen years and seven months a girl is old enough to marry.” He asked, as she eyed a little golden cross he wore against his breast, “How old are you?” “Fifteen,” she replied. “Well then!” said the stranger. “Does he lack sufficient means to make you happy, this lad?” “Oh no!” replied Toni, without looking up, fingering and letting go of the cross, “Connolly has become a rich man since the recent turn of events; his father took title of the whole plantation that once belonged to their master.” “Then why did you refuse him?” asked the stranger, and gently stroked the hair from her brow. “Did you not find him attractive?” With a quick toss of the head, the girl laughed; and answering his own question he jokingly whispered in her ear: “Might it perhaps have to be a white man who could win your favor?” To which, after flashing him a fleeting, dreamy look, she responded with a ravishing blush that swept over her sun-kissed face, and suddenly lay her head on his chest. Stirred by her comeliness and sweetness, the stranger called her his dear girl, and feeling as though delivered from all his troubles by the hand of God, wrapped her in his arms. He found it impossible to believe that all of these gestures could merely be the miserable expression of a cold-blooded and cruel-hearted betrayal. The troubled thoughts that had clouded his spirit lifted like a flock of vultures; he chided himself for having doubted her for a single second, and as he rocked her on his knees and inhaled her sweet breath he kissed her on the forehead as a sign of reconciliation and forgiveness between them. Meanwhile, suddenly pricking up her ears, as if she’d heard someone drawing near outside the door, the girl bolted upright; she thoughtfully and dreamily rearranged the cloth that had slipped from over her breasts; and only once she fathomed that it had been a false alarm did she turn back to the stranger with a cheerful look and remind him that if he did not soon make use of the hot water it would get cold. “Heavens,” she said, a bit taken aback, as the stranger peered at her in thoughtful silence, “why are you looking at me in such a strange way?” Fiddling with her pinafore, she tried to hide her growing embarrassment, and laughed out loud: “Strange Sir, what strikes you amiss at the sight of me?” The stranger, who wiped his brow with his hand, suppressing a sigh as he lifted her off his lap, replied: “A wondrous resemblance between you and a girl I once knew!” Noticing that he had been distracted from his merry mood, she gaily and attentively grabbed him by the hand and asked: “What girl?” Whereupon, reflecting a moment, the young man spoke up: “Her name was Marianne Congreve and she hailed from Strasbourg. I met her there, where her father was a merchant, shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution, and was fortunate enough to have received a yes to my proposal and her mother’s approval. Dear God, she was the most faithful soul under the sun, and the terrible and stirring circumstances under which I lost her leap to mind when I look at you, so that I cannot keep from crying.” Toni tenderly and intimately pressed her body close to his. “Is she no longer living?” “She died,” replied the stranger, “and it was only at her death that I fathomed that I had lost the epitome of all goodness and virtue. God knows,” he went on, leaning his aching head on her shoulder, “how I could have been so foolish as to criticize the recently established revolutionary tribunal one evening in a public place. I was accused of treason, they came looking for me; in my absence, as I was fortunate enough to have escaped to the outskirts of the city, the raving mob that craved a victim rushed to the house of my bride, and upon her truthful assurance that she did not know my whereabouts, under the pretense that she was in cahoots with me, the embittered hooligans simply dragged her off to the scaffold instead of me. No sooner was I informed of this terrible news than I emerged from my hideout, and shoving my way through the crowd to the place of execution, cried out at the top of my lungs: “Here, you inhuman beasts, am I!” But in response to the questions of several revolutionary judges who, alas, did not seem to know me, standing there on the platform in front of the guillotine, she turned away from me with a look indelibly etched into my soul and said: “I don’t know that person!” Whereupon, moments later, at the sound of the drumbeat and the howl of the mob, egged on by the trumped up charges of the bloodthirsty judges, the blade dropped and her head fell from her shoulders. How I was saved I cannot tell; I found myself a quarter of an hour later in the apartment of a friend, where I staggered from one faint to another, and toward evening, was loaded, half-mad, onto a carriage, and dispatched across the Rhine.” At these words, letting go of the girl, the stranger hastened to the window, and as she saw him bury his profoundly troubled face in a handkerchief, stirred by a deep sympathy for his plight, she impulsively rushed over to him, wrapped her arms around his neck and mingled her tears with his.

What happened next need not be told, since everyone who gets to this point in the tale can guess. Rousing himself afterwards, the stranger had no idea where the impetuous thing he’d done would lead him; in the meantime, however, he fathomed this much, that he had been saved and that he had nothing to fear from the girl in this house. Seeing her lying there on the bed with her arms crossed beneath her, crying her eyes out, he did his best to try and comfort her. He took off the little golden cross, a gift from his faithful Marianne, his dead bride; and leaning over Toni, whispering endless words of endearment, hung it around her neck as an engagement gift, as he called it.