It only took her a moment to scan it all.
"I am sick and needy. Won't you help me for I am dying from neglect." This was signed:
"Black Mammy,
"Judy, (her X mark.)"
Cherokee read it again. Her eyes closed, and
then opened, dilating in swift terror. Her slave-*mother
suffering for the necessities of life. She
who had spent years in chivalrous devotion to the
Bell family now appealed to her, the last of that
honored name.
A swift pain shot through her veins—a sudden increased anguish—a sense of something irremediable, hopeless, inaccessible, held her in its grip, and a voiceless, smothered cry rent her breast. Tears gushed from her eyes, scalding waters which fell upon her hands and seemed to wither them. Even the fern-leaf, the birth-mark, looked shrunken and shrivelled, as she gazed at it; something told her to remember it held the wraith of a life.
Cherokee was wild with grief. She went to the window and looked far out into the night, letting her sight range all the Southern sky, and the stars looked down with eyes that only stared and hurt her with their lack of sympathy. A gentle wind
