noon
He would confront this reputed mother of his darling and wring the truth from her . He was in a state of mind where any sort of a fairy tale would have seemed reasonable . He would almost have bribed some one to tell him that the woman he had loved , the woman he still loved -LRB- he felt a thrill of lawless pleasure in the confession -RRB- , was not the descendant of slaves , -- that he might marry her , and not have before his eyes the gruesome fear that some one of their children might show even the faintest mark of the despised race . At noon he halted at a convenient hamlet , fed and watered his mare , and resumed his journey after an hour 's rest . By this time he had well-nigh forgotten about the legal business that formed the ostensible occasion for his journey , and was conscious only of a wild desire to see the woman whose image was beckoning him on to Patesville as fast as his horse could take him . At sundown he stopped again , about ten miles from the town , and cared for his now tired beast . He knew her capacity , however , and calculated that she could stand the additional ten miles without injury .