The Shadow

by Mary White Ovington

DICK

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CHAPTER XXV

"What shall we do this evening?"

"I shall be studying."

"Oh, rot; don't work so hard."

It was morning in mid-May and Dick Brown was standing in the hallway of Mrs. Pickens' boarding-house, his hat set back on his head, turning for the last word with Hertha before he left for his day's task. It was a grief to him that they did not leave together; but, though she finished breakfast when he did, and had but a few minutes leeway beyond his time of departure, she was never ready when the minute came that he must go. So he stopped this morning to ask his question, knowing the answer, since he had received it the night before, but anxious to hold the young girl in conversation before he turned into the engrossing world of business that drove her from his thoughts. And yet, even when he was most concentrated on some perplexing detail associated with the handling of fancy trimmings, she would be back in his mind, far back where he might not turn to her and yet where, when the hour came that released him from the bondage of the city's trade, she was present—her brown eyes, to his fancy, looking at him with more favor than they had yet shown.

"Well, good-by," he said, grasping the doorknob.

"Good-by," she answered, and turned upstairs to her room.

Whirled through the city and over the bridge, Dick tried to obliterate the image of the girl he loved and to turn to schemes of business. He was well aware that he had not yet caught her fancy, that she was not in the least in love with him, but he reckoned on his staying powers and on the fortune that some day he meant to lay at her feet. Any one so alone in the world as she, and she seemed singularly alone, must need a protector; and if he could only be patient and work diligently the time might come when she would accept a home filled with every conceivable thing to use, lovely as the "House Beautiful" rooms exhibited in the department stores, and where, when she had wandered through the many chambers and corridors, she would accept the man who stood upon the threshold eager to bring this, and more, of comfort and luxury and watchful care into her life. So he sat tense in his seat (he sometimes got a seat going in to his work) and began with resolute will to ponder the problem of business success. And as he pondered his face took on a shrewd and calculating expression at variance with his youthful frame and his bright, speckled necktie.

At noon he went into a restaurant frequented by many business men of the neighborhood and was greeted by an elderly gentleman at a table near the doorway who invited him to sit down. Like the firm for which he worked, this man was a dealer in trimmings, and Dick was elated at such a sign of favor. Perhaps it might lead to an opportunity for advancement. He took his place with some embarrassment, however, not knowing whether this were an invitation to luncheon or only to a seat in which to have a friendly chat. Believing it wiser to assume the latter to be the case, he picked up the bill of fare and said in a loud voice, "I reckon you've ordered your grub."

Mr. James Talbert, whose modest sign on Broadway shone conspicuous among the plethora of foreign names, smiled good-humoredly and answered: "Not yet; I'm planning to order yours with mine. I don't have a young man fresh from the Sunny South to dine with me every day."

Richard Brown laughed hilariously to hide the hurt to his pride. It was not the first time that it had been conveyed to him that he was fresh.

A weary, indifferent waiter received the order, and in a short time they were engrossed in disposing of an excellent and hearty meal.

As he became less absorbed in his chops and sauté potatoes, Dick looked about the room filled with tables where busy men were intent on fortifying themselves with food before they went back to their engrossing work. He noted their faces, their figures, and guessed at their professions. The tall, thin young fellow ahead was a clerk like himself—he could tell by the way he was trying to joke with his waiter. There were newspaper men back of him; it was easy to determine them by their talk about this or the other "story." Moving down the aisle and returning his stare was a young, black-haired, dark-eyed Jew thrumming restlessly with his fingers. In business for himself, Dick guessed, and calculating on to-day's gains and to-morrow's expenditures. The young southerner wondered whether he would ever be able to do this, whether the day would come when he would have a business of his own.

"Chops all right?" The older man broke the silence.

"Hunky. See that fellow over there?" Dick pointed to a somewhat soiled, slouchily dressed youth who had taken a seat near them. "That's the way we look where I come from, only a heap more good-natured. Something like a mule, though, slow and kind of set-like; we could kick if it was worth while throwing out our heels. There ain't much hurry there, except if once in a lifetime you want to catch a train. Yes, and there's the factory, that's speeding up the folks."

"Miss it?" his companion asked.

"The way we do things, you mean? No, sir! I wouldn't go back, except for a vacation, not if you gave me a present of Casper County on a golden tray. I like it here; it's a race."

Dick spoke with emphasis and then took a great mouthful of food that required his full attention.

"Country boys are apt to feel that way." Mr. Talbert looked gravely at the young man before him. "The city would never grow as it does if it wasn't fed by country stock, strong young fellows who have worked out of doors and laid up energy to be exhausted later within the great buildings down town."

"I can't say as I ever did much work." The young Georgian grinned as he recalled his boyhood. "But I played a heap and made enough trouble for the neighbors to win me a gilt-edged certificate in cussedness. Business is a sort of play, I reckon, and the biggest daredevil comes out ahead."

"It means taking risks."

"Do you think," Dick asked, his cheeks flushing as though he expected to be guyed for his question, "that a fellow can come to New York any more without a penny and end a millionaire?"

"They're still doing it." The business man eyed his guest with evident interest. "But the number gets smaller all the time. It's a little like telling every boy that he can become president, this poor-man-to-millionaire business; nevertheless," looking intently at his listener, "it can be done."

"Honest Injun?" The joviality left Dick's face, though he tried to put it in his voice. His thin mouth was tightly drawn and the hard lines were accentuated about his deep blue eyes.

"Honest Injun." Mr. Talbert was amused again. "But don't forget the secret. Always look out for yourself. Don't think about the other fellow, for if he's a good business man you can count on it he isn't thinking about you."

"Listen!" Dick leaned forward. "I'm meaning what I say. I've got to get rich. It ain't for myself; it's for a girl, a girl that ought to have the best of everything in New York."

For the first time during the meal he spoke in a low voice, but with an intensity that drove the smile from his companion's face. With elbows on the table, his head resting on his hands, he looked into the older man's eyes as though he hoped by searching long enough to learn the secret of success that he saw about him in this great city—the success that moved outside in silent limousines, that inhabited beautiful houses filled with skilled servants, that sent its women and children, now the warm weather advanced, into other beautiful houses by the sea. In the Sunday supplements of the great papers he had seen pictures of these homes and of the women who dwelt in them. There was not a face among the many that belonged more truly in such surroundings than the face that he looked into at his boarding-house table every day. And among the men who had won this success were some, he knew, who had started as poor as he. He asked only to be told their secret.

Mr. Talbert did not smile at the mention of the girl as Dick feared he would. Instead he looked sympathetically at the long face before him.

"A girl's a good thing to work for," he said. "It keeps a man thrifty and sober. I'm not an expert on getting rich, for such money as I have was mostly made by my father before me. But I take it if a man is young and strong and has an aptitude for his profession, he can still get what he wants in these United States. But he's got to want it more than anything else in the world, more than leisure or friends, more, perhaps, than honor. He's got to carry his work with him, study it in the evening, dream of it at night. He's got to live poor before he can live rich. He must be able to use men for his own aims. He must skin or he'll be skinned. See here, Mac," clutching at a man who was passing, "come and give your advice to youth."

A large, comfortable looking gentleman stopped at his friend's bidding and looked quizzically at Dick as they were introduced. He would not sit down, and as the others were through their meal Talbert settled his account and they all stood for a moment together.

"Have a cigar?" offering one to Dick.

"I think I won't," Dick answered. "Perhaps that's one of the things to go slow on, eh, if I mean to succeed?"

"Yes, when it comes to buying them yourself; but never refuse a gift," and his new acquaintance thrust the cigar into the young man's hand.

"Here's an emigrant from the State of Georgia," Talbert said, turning to his friend, "who is bent on becoming a millionaire. He's got health and determination; all he asks for is advice. What's yours?"

"David Harum's golden rule," was the answer. "Do unto the other feller the way he'd like to do unto you, and do it fust."

They made their way past the waiters bearing their trays gleaming with straw-colored cocktails, bright with fruit, pleasantly odorous with freshly cooked meats and vegetables, on out into the street. The older men continued to explain the road to success in kindly speech, their tone and bearing at variance with the harsh gospel which they preached. Dick listened eagerly, as eagerly as he had once listened to the gospel of the evangelist at home. And as he shook hands and left them, he walked up Broadway feeling a strange elation. His hand went to his pocket for the cigar he usually smoked at this time, but, recalling himself, he put it resolutely back. He would live meagerly to-day that he might have a plethora in a golden to-morrow.

The soft May air blowing on his face recalled to him his southern home. He had been poor down there, and yet not poor in comparison with his neighbors. His father had owned hundreds of acres of miserable soil on which his tenants had planted cotton and reaped scanty crops. He recalled those tenants—sallow, ill-fed whites, shiftless blacks. Their cabins reeked with dirt and were always cluttered with children. The men were continually in debt, and while his father got from them all he could, being accounted a hard master by his neighbors, Dick knew that there was little enough that any one made. It had been a good thing when his mother had sold some of the property. Had it not been for their timber they would have known real poverty. He felt a sudden revulsion for his old home, its sordidness, its slow piling of penny upon penny with no greater outlook upon life than a new rifle or a Victrola in the best room. There was no game worthy the name to be played down there, only a monotonous round of stupid covetousness. Here the play was difficult and the stakes big.

He held his head very high that afternoon, and fairly touched the clouds when, before he went home, he was informed that he would again be sent for a short time upon the road. His first trip had brought in good results and he was to be entrusted with a better circuit and to receive a slight increase in salary. He felt grateful for the advancement, and then, recalling the advice of noontime, put this thought from him. If he were getting more money it was because the firm thought he was worth it, and that they must pay more or lose him. Therefore it was to his own interest, while serving them, to be looking for advancement. In the autumn he might seek a job with Mr. Talbert.

He was enough of a boy still to buy a box of candies to take to Hertha. Calculating that his luncheon had cost him nothing and that he would begin at once to save by smoking only one cigar a day, he spent a dollar on his gift, and with it tucked under his arm moved among the seething mass of faces, mysteriously upborne, on bodies with arms and legs, that stampeded the Brooklyn train. Once hanging to his hardly secured strap, contrary to the advice given him, he let the work of the day drop from his mind and fell into a day dream of a home of his own with Hertha as its queen. And as he thought of her, of her lightly poised head, her softly curling hair, her delicate hands, the minutes flew by and he was quite unconscious that he was standing amid a crowd of people, the women swaying on the straps to which they clung, one of them falling regularly against him at each station, the men endeavoring to read their newspapers while they balanced themselves with each recurring jolt. He was moving on as the train moved in a swift passage through time, stopping now and again at some well-marked station along the happy road of life.

As he neared his stopping place an old question came to perplex him. Who was this girl whom he so deeply loved? Ogilvie was a fine sounding name, and any one could see that she was descended from people of note. But he was curious to know something of her kin and of her early life. It was of no use to ask his mother or any of the folks at home. As he had once put it to Hertha, they were "hill billies," far removed from her progenitors. Mrs. Pickens had confessed ignorance when he had questioned her. The one person who could tell him anything he dared not question. There was something in Hertha's reserve that he was forced to respect, and yet he often wondered that any girl should be so wholly alone. She seemed to receive no mail. More than once, since she herself had first spoken of him, he had alluded to her brother, only to be met with a shy silence. He had never before known so silent a girl, or one, too, whom it was so difficult to interest. Sometimes when he recalled the Rosies and Annie-Lous at home over whom he had lorded it with the high hand of the best-known fellow in the county, he wondered that he should be so engrossed in one who was evidently indifferent to his advances. But he was keen enough to see that, like his coveted riches, the needed effort to gain her affection added to the intensity of his desire. But he did wish, as he clutched the candy to his side, that she would treat him a little better. They did not seem to be as near one another now as they had been in the winter when she was living with her Irish friend.

Nothing was solved as he ran up the stoop of Mrs. Pickens' boarding-house and put his key in the latch, but he was rewarded with a bright smile when, looking in at Hertha's open doorway, he tossed the box of candy on her bed. He was never invited over the threshold of her bedroom, though it was beyond his code of etiquette to understand why. In his mother's home the living-room contained the largest bed in the house, a massive affair with a variegated cover that every visitor was called upon to admire. But he had learned from experience that if he entered Hertha's room she shortly left it, and so, accepting her word of thanks, he went to his own quarters to make himself ready for dinner.

At eight o'clock, when Hertha was poring over a page of shorthand, vainly endeavoring to read the business letter from "Jones Brothers" to "Smith and Company," she heard a knock at her door. Opening it, she found Dick outside.

"I told them you didn't want to be disturbed," he hastened to say in answer to her look of annoyance, "but Mrs. Pickens and Miss Wood want you to come down and make a fourth at bridge."

"Get Mrs. Wood," Hertha made answer, "you know I can't play."

"Neither can she," Dick replied cheerfully, "but she don't know it. However, she won't," he added, "we've asked her."

Hertha looked at the page of wavering marks and hesitated.

"Oh, come along," Dick pleaded. "Do it 'to oblige Benson.' Mrs. Pickens has left a bunch of southern newspapers, just come in, to amuse us, but she wants you."

It was a standing joke in the household, the love its landlady bore for local southern news. A corner of her room was stacked with such weeklies as "The Cherokee Advocate," "The Talapoosie Ladies' Messenger," over which she would pore, reading the births and deaths, the marriages and divorces, the lawsuits and business tribulations, the receptions and engagements of the southern world as though each community were her own. "They're my novels," she would retort when Dick jeered at her fondness for these local sheets. Hertha appreciated her unselfishness in joining the game, and, obeying an impulse to have a good time, flung down her textbook, picked up her box of candy and, accompanied by Dick, went downstairs.

The young man was elated. At Hertha's request he placed the candy in the center of the table and seized upon her as his partner without permitting the question to be decided by cutting the cards. For this Hertha was grateful, since she knew little of the game and was confident that she would spoil the good time of either of the women should they have to bear her mistakes upon their score. Of Miss Wood she stood much in awe. That lady was an assistant secretary in an Association for Improving the Condition of the Destitute and knew a prodigious amount regarding poverty and crime. She played her cards as though solving one of her, day's cases. Mrs. Pickens had played to oblige too often to have any feeling of the importance of the game. To Dick, cards were a matter of luck; his failures were always attributed to poor hands, and with Hertha opposite him he cared little whether he ended in a pit of defeat or on a pinnacle of success.

"I wish you wouldn't talk so much about above and below the line," Hertha said, as they started upon a new rubber.

"Why?" Mrs. Pickens asked.

"Because it's in shorthand, and I want to forget the old stuff. All the sense of a sentence depends upon whether you're above or below."

"It's much the same in bridge," Mrs. Pickens made answer. "Now don't make it, Dick, unless you have the cards."

It was before auction bridge when the dealer's position was an important one.

"I'm not reckless, am I?" Dick asked, appealing to his partner. "I'm as careful as a donkey walking by the side of a precipice."

"Just about," said Hertha, laughing.

Forgetful of the game, he looked at her as though he would devour her.

"Perhaps you will decide on something," Miss Wood remarked sarcastically, "or let your partner."

"Make it, partner," said Dick, but Hertha, frightened at the opportunity, threw down a good hand.

Certainly her partner never lectured her upon her poor plays. He was quite indifferent when she took his Queen with her King, and when in a burst of adventure she doubled her opponent and lost four tricks he proved to her that she had done exactly right. This disaster made her cautious and in the following hand, with four aces, she made it spades and scored eight points instead of a grand slam. When the modest figure was placed below the line her partner cheered her for her success.

"Really, Miss Ogilvie," Miss Wood said, "if you want to learn bridge you must not think that a make like that is good. It is quite wrong."

Hertha laughed acquiescence. She was having a good time and enjoying Dick's ridiculous talk as hand after hand he kept up a stream of comment. Mrs. Pickens laughed with them, but the fourth member of the party became angry.

"This is not bridge," she said, her hands shaking as she picked up the cards dealt her.

"Ain't it?" said Dick good-naturedly. "Well, it's fun, anyway."

He took an unconscionably long time to decide on the trump, clutching his cards tightly, and wrinkling his forehead in imitation of his indignant opponent.

"Oh, do make it something!" Mrs. Pickens urged him.

"Very well, hearts!" cried Dick, "Hearts, the best suit in the pack."

He broke into exaggerated praise of the quite ordinary hand Hertha spread out for him. He loved the careful way in which she put each card in sequence.

"The King of my suit!" he cried. "Didn't I know you had it! Saw it with my poker eye. Ever play poker, Miss Hertha?"

He had asked the question before, and she did not trouble to answer him. Not that he cared whether he was answered or not. He felt elated at his day and at the evening that was bringing him such good fortune.

Talking steadily as he threw down his cards, he won a finesse, for by this time Miss Wood had lost all track of the game.

"What did I tell you?" he cried to Hertha boisterously. "This is the time we're going under and over both. Just you wait. Count the tricks! One, two, three, four, five, six—only four more and the rubber's ours. Watch me now! Just watch yours truly haul in the goods. Watch me——"

"Oh, stop talking, Dick," said Mrs. Pickens good-humoredly, "and play."

She was very fond of this southern lad, her one man boarder, and was quite ready herself to frolic. But, seeing the thundercloud on her partner's face, she endeavored to bring some seriousness into the occasion.

"Well, here goes!" cried the young man. "My trump card!" and he flung down the ace of hearts.

The deuce, tray and four spot fell upon it.

"One, two, three, four!" he called out. "Kiss the dealer!"

Leaning far over the table, his lips came within an inch of Hertha's own.

She drew back, blushing crimson, her body stiff with antagonism. Mrs. Pickens, to relieve the situation, put her arm around the youth's neck and, drawing down his head, gave him the asked-for kiss. But she could not resist murmuring, "A poor substitute."

"Three tricks more," Dick called, and dashed through the hand.

He won the game and the rubber, but he had reduced his partner to a state of frigidity excelling even Miss Wood's. "We won't play any more," she said to that lady, "I know you are tired at our noise." And with a general good-night she went out of the room, leaving the box of candy behind her.

Miss Wood added the score conscientiously, pronounced her partner and herself the winners, professed indignation at Dick's offer to pay anything he might owe, and, accompanied by Mrs. Pickens, left the young man to himself.

Richard Shelby Brown looked across the table at the empty chair and deliberately kicked himself. "What a mutt I am," he thought. "But if she were a princess, born with a lot of knights bowing before her all day long, she couldn't hold her head any higher." Then he pulled the cigar that Mr. Talbert had given him out of his pocket, struck a light and began to smoke. And as he sniffed the delicious fragrance and blew rings into the air, as he looked about the room at the bright pictures all descriptive of gaiety and happiness, he grew less disturbed and gradually regained his self-possession. One could never tell what a girl liked, but surely she must find it pleasant to know that a man wanted to kiss her. Had she slapped him on the face, as Annie-Lou would have done, he would not have minded. But she had blushed, and, oh how beautiful she became when the color rushed into her face! Tilted back in one chair, his feet on another, he puffed at his cigar and puffed again, and smiled gently, thinking of the princess in her room and of the palace that he must hasten to build.

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CHAPTER XXVI

There was no question that Hertha Ogilvie was not making a success at stenography and typewriting at the excellent school which Dick had found for her. Among the thirty-odd pupils who had entered in February, only two were as far behind as she. And though her teachers, who liked her for her good manners and quiet speech, were ready with encouragement, assuring her that the moment would come when, with unexpected rapidity, the light of understanding would shine amid the darkness of insignificant lines and dots and she would forge ahead, she herself did not believe in the miracle. This was perhaps her greatest handicap—distrust in her ability blocked her road. An ever recurring sense of stupidity kept her repeating the same tasks without progress, until, filled with disgust, she threw her books aside, declaring that she would give it up and take to sewing again.

This was her mood on the Saturday afternoon following the game of bridge, when, dropping her work, she went into the park with Bob Henderson, her next door neighbor and devoted companion. Bob was the oldest of four children, though but six himself, and when his mother could spare him from the home tasks that were already piling upon his small shoulders, he liked best to go with Hertha among the trees to the lake where every day there was some new interest. This afternoon it was a brood of ducks that were taking their first bath. And while Hertha sat on the grass he wandered along the shore, throwing in bits of bread and sometimes laughing softly to himself.

The afternoon was full of golden lights, the warm sun bringing a feeling of happy drowsiness. School was forgotten and the southern girl basked in the languorous fragrance of spring. Life had begun again for the world. Across from where she sat on a granite stone a little white butterfly lighted and slowly folded and unfolded its wings. It quivered on its resting place as though not yet accustomed to flight. The buds on the azalea were slowly opening. Everywhere life was close to fulfilment and yet as though waiting for some final word from sun or earth.

"Please come here, Miss Ogilvie," Bob called, running up to her. "Look at this bird. I bet it's broken its wing."

A white birch hung over the path by the water's edge and beneath it, on the smooth asphalt, fluttered a little bird, brilliant with black and orange markings. It hopped away as they approached, but made no flight, and as they followed they could mark each splotch of black and white and orange.

"What is it?" Bob asked eagerly.

"I never saw it before," Hertha said. "I think it belongs up in the treetops."

Bob eyed the broken wing. "It was some boy," he said admiringly, "that could hit such a little thing with nothing but a stone."

"Was that how it happened?"

"Sure. I've seen the boys throwing stones up the trees, but it ain't often they bring down a bird."

Making a tremendous effort, the bird flew on to a low branch of the birch. Amid the young green leaves its dress of orange and black showed gayer than ever. It reminded Hertha of one of Ellen's children, a little girl with shining black face and bright black eyes, who used to wear as a kerchief her mother's bandana. She was like a bird herself, swift of movement, trilling with song.

"It was a mean thing to do," Hertha cried indignantly as she watched the warbler flutter and fall to the ground again. "Why couldn't they let it stay in the tree top? I suppose the boys think it's fun to bring it down with a stone."

"Sure," said Bob cheerfully.

"Don't you do it," his companion commanded. "Can't you see how it hurts? It's crippled through no fault of its own."

"What do you think'll happen?" Bob asked, a little anxiously. Hertha's tone was making an impression on him.

"I'm afraid it will die. Any animal can seize it now."

"I tell you what." Bob's face brightened. "I'll catch it and put it in our old canary cage. Our bird's dead now, and we can feed this and hear it sing."

He crouched to make a sudden spring, but Hertha held him back. "Don't!" she said.

"Why not?" Bob asked, straightening up.

The girl found it hard to give her answer. "See how it's trying to get away," she said at last. "I believe it would rather live a few hours free, in the sunshine, than to be caged for life."

"I'll give it some crumbs, anyway," said Bob, and, strewing bread along the path, went back to his more engrossing ducks.

The bird of the tree tops refused the bread of grain and, making a tremendous effort, rose to the birch tree again and moved among the leaves, its black head bobbing about hunting for insects, its free wing fluttering with pleasure. "What a comfort it is," Hertha thought to herself, "that it lives only in to-day."

Becoming weary of his ducks, Bob joined his companion where she sat on the grass, and leaning up against her asked to hear about Tom-of-the-Woods. Tom was a wonderful boy who lived in the forest, eating roots and fruit, for he would not kill any living creature. The berries that he found and the oranges that he plucked from the trees were finer than any other oranges and berries in the world. Tom made his house out of palm leaves tied together and set up on shoots of bamboo. He did not use it much, however, for at night he loved to sit under the stars listening to the screech owls and the toads and the little four-footed creatures that came out of their hiding-places when the sun went down. It was then that he talked with the rabbits and the great white owl, the wisest bird in the world. Tom went to the city and purchased a top that he could spin so fast on the sidewalk that it disappeared. How he got it back he never told, but it was always there in his pocket whenever he came to town. It was a long, comfortable story, without plot and with little incident, the kind of story that you could begin and leave off at your convenience. But before Bob was half tired of it, some one called out "Hallo," and Dick appeared coming along the path toward them.

"Glad I found you," he said gaily, and then, turning to the little boy, "Your mother says it's time for you to be trotting home."

Bob viewed the newcomer suspiciously. It was not his first experience in having Dick interrupt when he and Miss Ogilvie were enjoying a good time.

"Very well," said Hertha, rising, "we'll go home together."

This arrangement was not in the least what Dick desired, but he said nothing and the three walked slowly away from the lake to the park's entrance where Bob's house could be seen across the broad street.

"Say," Dick whispered, "let the little fellow go and come out rowing with me."

Bob heard and clutched Hertha's hand tight.

"I'm going on the road Monday," Dick added.

Bob only clutched the harder and tried to drag his friend across the street.

Realizing the need of strategy, Dick put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a dime. "Run over and get yourself a soda, sonny," he said; "I bet you know the way."

Bob's hesitation was short. "Sure," he replied after an infinitesimal wait, and dropping Hertha's hand dashed across the street. They saw him enter the friendly drug store and then, at Dick's earnest pleading, they walked back along the path that they had come.

It was a day for dreaming, for lightly putting the oar in the water to withdraw it again. On the soft wind, from the bushes, white and purple and golden, from the new buds of the resinous trees, came a fragrance, sweet and pungent. Rowing beside the west bank, the boat kept in shadow, but beyond this restful line of dimmed light the sun danced upon the water, the ripples streaming with silver and gold. The late blossoming trees still stood tall, dark, with naked limbs, but the drooping willow gleamed pale yellow, and the maples and elms were dropping their small blossoms to stand clothed in summer green. Robins called to one another across the lake, busy carrying bits of grass and twigs to make their nests. Her hat off, Hertha sat in the stern of the boat, sometimes trailing her hand in the water, her head bent as she watched the trickling drops, again sitting erect gazing among the trees and out to the sky beyond.

"Thinking about home?" Dick asked, and she nodded and smiled.

"Let's visit the garden," she suggested, when having rowed the length of the lake they returned to the landing.

There was a riot of flowers in the great stretches of the formal garden, but the girl leading, they made their way to the pansy beds. Deep, velvety purple blossoms nodded up at them; soft blues and lavenders, streaked with deeper blue and purple, touched plants of glowing yellow. Hertha bent and began to talk to the nodding heads as though they were children.

"They're more alive," she said to Dick, apologizing for her childishness, "than any flowers I know."

He entered her conceit. "There's a lot of difference among them, though, don't you think?" He bent over with her to look closely. "The blue ones don't look like they were blue at all; but that dark lady down there, for instance, she hasn't enjoyed her dinner. Perhaps last night she had an overdose of dew."

"I'm afraid the expression is chronic," Hertha answered gravely.

They wandered on where bushes of spirea grew on either side the path—"Bridal wreath, don't they call it?" Dick asked timidly—on among the tall hickory and chestnut trees; then up the hill to the rose garden, the green buds of the newly trimmed plants beginning to show touches of color, and down again to the little valley where the mischievous bronze baby, standing in the water surrounded by his guard of spouting turtles, clutches a duck that pours out a constant stream of sparkling drops into the pool below.

"How does any one think of such things?" Dick asked gazing with admiration at the miniature fountain.

"It seems to me easy enough to think of them," Hertha answered. "But how does any one make them?"

The sun was low as with reluctant feet they turned homeward. Dick had been quiet, in touch with the beauty about him, the right companion for a dreamlike afternoon. But the springtime had its present call to him, and as they neared the end of their walk he could not forego a word.

They had come upon a sunny strip of path and Hertha, slipping off her coat, threw it over her arm.

Dick took it from her. "Let me carry it, dear," he said.

It was the first time he had dared thus to speak to her, and his breath came quick.

Awakening to find her dream was over, Hertha drew away from him.

"I know I have no right to say anything, Hertha," he went on, "I'm poor still, but I can't go away again without telling you a little of what I think of every minute of my life."

The broad path had many people upon it, the most of them, like themselves, on their way home. Hertha looked about as though asking him to say nothing then, but the young man continued in a low voice:

"I haven't anything to say but what you know and every one else knows who sees you and me. I love you like I didn't believe any one could love another. I don't ask for anything but to work for you, hoping some time that you'll take what I have to give. It just about kills me to see you worrying about your work or money. It's for a man to do that. Don't worry, dear," he said the word again, almost in a whisper, "we can walk along together. Let me carry the things."

"No!" Hertha said in a whisper. "Seems to me like it was meant I should carry them alone."

But she did not take the coat from him when they reached the house, letting him take it to her room. He laid it on her bed and at once went out, without glancing her way, but when he turned to her at dinner where she sat beside him he could see a troubled look in her eyes. He felt as though he had stirred the waters, just a little, as he had stirred the lake with his oar that afternoon.

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CHAPTER XXVII

The look of happiness on Dick's face made Hertha pass a restless night. She tossed for a long time on her bed, and only fell into a deep sleep by morning. And from this she was awakened by a vivid dream. She was back in her old home among the pines, and never in her waking hours had she seen the cabin more clearly, its log walls, the weeds growing out of the white sand. And as she saw her own home, she saw, too, the home of the whites with its overhanging vines and its broad balcony. In her dream she moved through one and then another, but each room was deserted and empty. She ran among the pines and under the live-oaks, draped with their fringe of swaying moss, but on all her way encountered no human being; only against the blue sky was a long wavering line of birds. The loneliness overwhelmed her, it bore down upon her like a physical weight, until, struggling against the feeling of oppression, she awoke into the hot morning, threw off her blanket and raised herself on her pillow the better to breathe.

As she dressed and thought of her dream, she was overcome with remorse. If the homes were empty, it was because she had made them so. Their life was in her thought, and she had deliberately thrust them far back in her mind. Her lover, whom she tried hard to despise; Miss Patty, who had shown her so many kindnesses; her mother and sister and brother—the command to her heart had been that they should be forgotten. Standing before her mirror and coiling her hair, her hands shook as she thought of the death of her past. And she resolved that before long, when she could reach a decision as to the present, she would bring at least some of the figures back to the empty rooms.

The time had come, she told herself, to determine upon her next step. It was neither kind nor right to play month after month with a man's affection, allowing him to spend money upon her, to grow daily to care more for her, if she was sure that she could never care for him. She sighed a little at her conscientiousness, for Dick, when he kept where he belonged, was a pleasant adjunct to her life. And her second decision must be in regard to her profession. If she could not do better at stenography, she must cease to spend her income trying to master the subject. It would never do to stay on here exhausting her legacy fruitlessly. She turned from her mirror to her desk and took up a calendar that hung above it. To-day was May 22. School would be over on June 24. The day after that would be Saturday. Putting a circle around the date, June 25, she determined in her mind that she would at that time definitely decide on her next step. This resolution taken, she was genuinely relieved, for she knew that, as she would have obeyed such a mark at school had it meant the handing in of a problem or a written paper, so she would obey it now in her difficult life. It was with a feeling of righteous satisfaction, as though the decision had already been reached, that she went down to breakfast.

Dick was late and she slipped out of the house before he saw her. Her day's plan was made, and for the first time in some weeks she went to New York and back to her own church. In Brooklyn she had looked in upon one ecclesiastical edifice after another to be dissatisfied with each, and it was with a feeling of rest and happiness that she returned to her first church home. But though the music was as beautiful as always, there was no one there to remember her, and she went out a little lonely.

Her cheeks were pink as she climbed the three flights and knocked at Kathleen's door. Kathleen had not been cordial to her since her defection. But Hertha, who gave her affection to few and who, finding it hard to give, found it equally difficult to take away, had sought her old friend more than once, ignoring Kathleen's refusal to cross the river. It was some weeks now since they had had a chat together, and as she stood outside the door the young girl found her heart beat fast in hope of a cordial welcome and perhaps a dinner at the little table with Billy sitting between them. If Kathleen would only invite her to dinner, she would help to get it.

The lower hall door had been open and she had no intimation as to whether or not Kathleen was home. Her knock brought no response. Thinking that her friend might return shortly, she sat on the stairs and waited until one o'clock had passed and she felt sure that Kathleen was out at work or dining elsewhere. She was miserably disappointed and wished that at least she had her old key and might enter and look in at the rooms. Probably the flowers were wilting, needing, like herself, a friend. With a white face and drooping mouth she turned downstairs.

An ice cream soda at a drug store is not a sufficient Sunday dinner and it was with a feeling of faintness, a desire to eat her meal alone and sulk if she wished, that Hertha sat down at the supper table.

"Hallo," Dick called out from his seat as she slipped into hers, "where did you get your Sunday dinner?"

"In New York," was the answer.

"You missed a peach at home. A fried chicken peach with corn fritters. I can taste it now!" And Dick ostentatiously smacked his lips. "What did you have?" he asked.

"Nothing especial."

"Well, you missed it."

"I suppose I did," said Hertha, with more than a touch of crossness, "but that doesn't prevent my eating my supper."

"Indeed you are not seeing that any of us are helped," Mrs. Pickens cried, calling Dick's attention to his duties at the head of the table, and Hertha soon found herself making the best of the left-overs of the previous meal.

No one seemed in good spirits. Mrs. Wood told them all a half dozen times that her head ached, and her daughter showed on her face that she had heard the same tale at regular and irregular intervals during the day. She looked more than ever as though she wished she were a man, a desire that was rarely absent from her thoughts. "A man," she was wont to say, "is not expected to earn the family income and also be a companion and nurse, and if by any chance he did take all three positions he would make sure to be paid well for them." Mrs. Pickens was tired, she was always tired on Sunday, it being the maid's easiest and her hardest day; and Dick was disgusted that yesterday's happiness had been spirited away with the morning. So the conversation lagged and only as the meal was almost concluded did it take an unexpected and exciting turn.

It was Miss Wood who began it. "You are from the South, I think, Miss Ogilvie?" she said, addressing Hertha.

"Yes," answered Hertha.

"So am I," called out Dick.

"I am aware of that fact," Miss Wood went on in anything but a cordial tone, "but I wished to ask Miss Ogilvie's opinion on a certain question. I was reading in a magazine to-day," she looked across at Hertha, ignoring the young man at the table's head, "in an article by a southern physician, a man, I understand, of some note, a very sweeping statement. In writing of the Negroes he said that he was confident there was not a pure colored woman in the country above the age of sixteen."

Mrs. Pickens choked over her bread and butter. She had not been brought up to discuss sociological questions and she deeply disapproved of the way Miss Wood frequently introduced them, especially at meal time. Last week they had been treated to a shocking tale of reformatories, but this was the first time they had been drawn into the social evil. Looking at Hertha, she expected to see her with drooping head murmuring a gentle nothing. But she was mistaken. The southern girl's face was on fire, with anger, not shame.

"It's not true," she said.

"And I say it is true," cried Dick, bringing his fist down on the table. "That doctor knew what he was writing about. It's damned true, every word of it."

He gulped as he realized he had been guilty of swearing, but Miss Wood, who was in control of the conversation, paid no attention to him. "I am interested in what you say," she went on to Hertha, "for it agrees with my own impression. I have not met many colored people in my work, but I have had a few cases among them, and while I have seen degradation it has not seemed to me any greater than that among the whites of the same class. Such a sweeping statement as this is unjust."

"It's wicked," said Hertha, addressing Miss Wood. Despite every effort at control, she found her chin trembling and her voice shaking a little. "I have known many colored women, servants and teachers, and I know they were pure and good."

"You were fooled," Dick cried excitedly. "That doctor knew what he was talking about. A nigger wench is always rotten. Why, every southern man knows it."

"Indeed?" Miss Wood looked at him for the first time.

"Dick!" said Mrs. Pickens, in real consternation at the turn the conversation was taking. "You should not talk like that. You owe us an apology."

"I didn't start the subject."

"That's quite true," his landlady replied, "and we'll drop it."

Dick was still defiant. "I'm sorry I swore," he said, speaking more quietly, "but it's a swearing subject. And I won't be picked up as meaning what I didn't intend. A man needn't be rotten to know what a woman's like. And the nigger women are all the same. They don't understand what it means to be pure. And I tell you, the men are worse. Why, every white woman down South's afraid of them. And good reason, too. It ain't safe for them to go out alone at night. Some places it ain't hardly safe day or night. If we didn't string up a black buck every now and then for an example, we'd never be safe. They're a bad lot, the whole crew of them, and they're getting more blasted impertinent every day."

He brought his fist down again and faced them all, his mouth set in its narrow, ugly line, his eyes hard as steel.

Miss Wood smiled over at Hertha. "I'm glad you don't agree," she said.

She was genuinely interested in the subject, and she also rejoiced in showing Richard Brown at a disadvantage. It was her earnest hope that he would not win so attractive a girl as Hertha for his wife.

"No!" said Hertha, "I don't agree." She was close to tears. Unless she told her whole story, nothing that she might say about the Negroes would count, and she was not prepared to tell her story. But her heart was hot with anger, and turning to Dick for the first time in the discussion she cried out, "What do you know about it? You're nothing but a cheap Georgia cracker!" and with this retort rose from the table and hurried to her room.

"Dick, how could you?" Mrs. Pickens asked when the two were left alone together.

"I didn't begin it," he said again.

"No, but you certainly went on with it. How can you expect a girl like Hertha to like you when you talk so coarsely and say such terrible things? She was right, anyway; I'm a southerner and I don't believe such a sweeping statement as that."

"Well, I do," said Dick emphatically, back at the dispute again. "I'm not a nigger lover." He wiped his face with his handkerchief and, getting up, began to pace the room. "That stiff old maid with her darned talk makes me want to kill somebody."

He stopped in front of Mrs. Pickens and took up the subject again. "Haven't I known the niggers? They worked my father's land, when they didn't loaf and get drunk. Pure women! Every mother's child with a different father! I know 'em. Ain't I seen 'em, the splay-footed, stinking devils!"

Mrs. Pickens looked at him, surprised at the intensity of his feeling. She had taken the black people all her life as a matter of course, accepting their failings and shortcomings, never questioning their inferiority, but also never questioning their good qualities and their value in the world in which she was reared.

"I think you ought not to talk that way about any human being," she said gently, "and on Sunday, too."

"They ain't human," Dick declared, and then added sulkily, "anyway not more than half human."

"You don't believe," Mrs. Pickens spoke a little hesitatingly, "you don't think, Dick, that they're our brothers in Christ?"

"No," he roared in answer, "they're no brothers of mine, the dirty, big-lipped, splay-footed bucks. What are you giving me? Want me to take 'em into my parlor, marry 'em to my sisters——"

"Oh, come!" said Mrs. Pickens, with a little laugh, "I'm a southerner, you know! You don't have to talk that stuff to me."

"Well, and ain't I a southerner? No, I'm nothing but a cheap Georgia cracker, that's what I am. But I ain't a nigger lover, anyway. Pretty way to talk to a feller, ain't it, now?" he said, facing Mrs. Pickens, the anger dying in his eyes.

"It was very unkind; I don't wonder you're angry." Then she added, looking keenly at him, "If she thinks that way about you, why don't you give her up?"

"Oh, don't say that!" The lad's whole appearance changed, his mouth softened, the tears started to his eyes. He gripped the table and looked at his woman friend as though she had struck him a blow. "I couldn't stand that. I love her so."

"But you know, Dick," there was a teasing smile on Mrs. Pickens' face, "an attractive girl like Hertha is sure to have a lot of beaus, and she can't marry all of them."

"There isn't anybody else; you can see for yourself there isn't anybody else. I've got to have her. I'll go to the devil if I don't!"

He was so changed, so shaken with feeling, that Mrs. Pickens took the hand that hung by his side and patted it. And then to her amazement and her happiness, for it was good to mother this long-legged piece of masculinity, she found the boy kneeling by her side, his head buried on her shoulder.

"I suppose," he said, looking up after a minute and blinking, "she had an old black mammy that took care of her and loved her and that she loved. Perhaps," contemptuously, "she played with nigger babies when they were cute and small. Nigger babies can be awful cute."

Mrs. Pickens smoothed his ruffled hair, but said nothing.

"Well, I'm a Georgia cracker," he declared next, with desperate calmness, "and she's right in thinking I come cheap."

"She didn't mean it like that!"

"I don't know what she meant," he went on wearily. "I don't half understand her. The only time we get along together is when neither of us says a word."

Mrs. Pickens laughed, and Dick, rising sheepishly to his feet, walked to the open window. When he turned back he seemed his usual self again.

"I'll be out of the way soon enough now," he said. "I'm off on the road to-morrow."

"Yes, dear."

"You couldn't go to her room by and by, could you, and tell her I'm sorry I made such a rumpus?"

"Of course. And I will say, Dick, that I think this time she is as much to blame as you. You only ran down the darkies, but she——"

"She lambasted me, all right. I know I'm not her kind. But what does she think she's going to get?" His anger flared up again for a moment. "Does she expect to find a prince in that precious school of hers? Or perhaps she thinks she'll meet him when she goes to work in Wall Street. That's so, she might, and he'd fall to her, all right."

He grew jealous at his picture and fear overtook him; for as Mrs. Pickens had said, there was more than one beau for a pretty girl, and Hertha was more than pretty—she was a woman whom a man could not forget.

"I've got to have her," he said, looking beyond the reach of the room out into the space in which Hertha's self stood out before him. "I can't see anything without her. You're mighty good to me," he added as he turned to go, "it was a lucky day when Jim Watson steered me up these steps."

"I haven't done anything," Mrs. Pickens made haste to answer, "but I promise after this I'll do what I can."

At ten o'clock she knocked at his door. He opened to her at once, and, seeing his face drop, she knew that he had hoped for a word from another visitor.

"You'll see her at breakfast, Dick; that's all I could get for you. I think she's more hurt than you or I can understand."

Dick sat at his open window until midnight, and tossed on his bed for a long time after that. He remembered the afternoon of yesterday when together they had sat in the boat and had walked among the flowers, quietly living in the spirit of the spring. And now, to-night a thunderstorm had come and drenched them both! He liked his imagery, and, tired of cursing himself, turned over at last and went to sleep.

She did appear at breakfast the next morning dressed for her school, and looking as she always looked, quite composed and very lovely. But when at the door he stopped to say good-by, she, for the first time, went out and walked to the car with him. All the way he did not say a word, so fearful was he of uttering the wrong one. They stood on the corner, both silent, till her car came in sight.

"I hope you'll have a pleasant trip," she said, holding out her hand to him.

"Thank you," he answered, shaking the hand limply.

So fearful was he that he would offend her by holding it a moment too long that he scarcely grasped it at all. But, save for this slight error, certainly on the safe side of the account, he behaved with the utmost correctness. She boarded the car and passed from his sight. But to the inward eye of memory she stood, illumined with the golden light of a lover's worship, aureoled, winged, a creature for the heaven of the enraptured gods.

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CHAPTER XXVIII

It was a great relief to Hertha when Dick went away. She had been indignantly angry at his railing against the colored people, "her people," as she had so lately called them; and, added to her anger, was a sense of impotence, of inability properly to answer him. Sometimes she almost believed that it was her duty to tell the whole family the story of her life—only thus could she convince them of the virtue of the Negro. But she shrank inexpressibly from such a revelation. To tell of the goodness of her colored mother meant that she must also tell of the sin of her own mother, a sin accounted so great a disgrace that it was hidden at the cost of a white child's racial integrity. They would enjoy the story, she had no doubt. Mrs. Pickens would love it as pure gossip and Miss Wood would enjoy it equally, though she would cover her pleasure with the veil of the interest of a sociologist. To talk about herself was always repugnant to Hertha, and to speak to these new people of her past was becoming unthinkable. The man she meant to marry should know of it, but she pushed all thought of marriage from her life.

Dick's words, however, rankled daily, and while it was a futile pursuit, destined in no way to help to install the Negro in his rightful place in Mrs. Pickens' household, she spent many hours picturing the Georgia boy's childhood and contrasting it unfavorably with her own. He had told her something of his home, she had seen one of his mother's letters, and she made what was in reality a fairly shrewd guess at his former surroundings. When a little girl she had lived near a white family that counted itself of importance, but whose standards she despised. These people occupied a long, low house, devoid of paint or whitewash, with broken steps from which the railing was long since absent. The rooms of the house opened upon a porch and near the steps was a table with a pitcher and bowl. It was the washroom of the home, and at noon especially it was amusing to watch the men come up and with much spluttering pour water over their faces and run their wet hands through their hair. Ablutions were performed here day and night. The rear of the house was ill-kept and dirty, and once, when Tom brought home a bright piece of rug, thrown out on the dust heap, Mammy rebuked him sharply and burned the offending rag in the stove. The men of the house had been rough and unmannerly and the ugly, sallow women had dipped snuff and looked like slatterns. Probably Dick's sisters (he had told her he had two older sisters) were sallow, with straight thin hair and shrill voices. If they did not dip snuff, they certainly chewed gum, a practice in which Dick himself indulged. "Cheap white trash, dirty white trash," this would be the best word her mammy could say for such people, except perhaps after a good meal or an uplifting sermon when she would admit that they "hadn't had advantages."

And yet it was the memory of her colored mother and not the word of apology from Dick or of excuse from Mrs. Pickens that brought Hertha to the car that Monday morning. Ellen, she felt sure, would have rejoiced at her retort, thrilling with pleasure at it, but Mammy would have been grieved. "Don' make yoursel' cheap, chile," she had once said in rebuke to Ellen, after her daughter had broken out in fierce and angry attack upon a stupid father whom she could not persuade to do his duty by his children. "Keep you' temper. Bad manners carry you back on you' path." Hertha knew that she had not kept her temper, and in recognition of the training from a gentle teacher reared in a school whose doors have long since closed, she made her gesture of apology. But her resentment against the "cheap cracker" was slow in dying out, and she rejoiced as she moved about the house that he was absent from it.

She and Bob became greater friends than ever and took many walks in the park, watching with happy interest the change from spring to full summer. On a Friday afternoon of the week that Dick had left she went to the great department store in New York where she loved to make her few purchases to buy a top for Bob, partly on Bob's account, partly because she herself enjoyed the outing. It was late in the season for tops, but in the interminable story that meandered on through the pleasant paths they traversed in the park Tom-of-the-Woods was spinning his top and Bob wanted a new one of his own. So, in no hurry over her purchase, lingering to look at the lovely silks and satins in the great rotunda, Hertha at last found herself in the basement and, appealing to a floor walker, was directed to the fifth floor where tops were to be found among the toys. She pushed her way into the elevator and, standing well in the rear, waited while the other customers got out one by one until, left alone, the boy at the wheel called out "Fifth floo', upholstery, curtains, toys."

When she was new to the city she had looked curiously at the dark faces of the men who ran the elevators, thinking that some time she might see one that she knew. But this had never happened and she had ceased to expect it. There was no mistaking, however, the pleasant drawling voice, the long drawn out "toy-ese" that came from the man at the wheel. Impetuously moving forward and grasping his arm before he had time to open the door she drew him around to her and cried out "Tom!"

"Yes'm," he answered, looking at her with a serious smile.

He had changed, but for the better, she saw that in a flash. His mouth was more firmly set, about his eyes was a more determined look. He was still a boy, but was fast gaining the outlook upon the world of a man.

"Tom!" Hertha cried again, "what are you doing here?"

She held his arm in hers. "Let go, Hertha," he said in a tone of command, "I must open the door."

She loosed her hold and he drew the door open, but no one entered and they shot on up again.

"How far do you go?" she asked.

"To the eighth."

"Well, stop here!" They were still alone, moving on above the sixth floor. "Stop here, Tom, between these floors, please, please!"

Her voice was full of emotion and he turned his wheel and stopped at her bidding. He had seen her when she entered and his surprise was not great like hers. That she was a beautiful young woman, taking her place in the white world, was what he had expected. He felt pride in her pretty dress and graceful carriage; but he recognized her aloofness, her position with the dominant race. Now, however, as she grasped his arm and greeted him with the old, bright, comradely look, for a moment he felt himself her boy again.

"Why aren't you at school?" she demanded.

He was recalled to his position by repeated clicks of his indicator. "You know, Sister," the name slipped out unawares, "I can't explain a thing like that between two floo's with the bells ringing for me above and below."

"Then come and explain it to me to-night. You must, Tom. I'll do something desperate if you don't come."

Her face was aglow with excitement, her eyes shone and she gripped her silk-gloved hands together.

Doubtful whether he should obey her, he still could not resist her pleading. "All right, I'll come," he promised and sprang the car upward.

They had another moment alone when she slipped her address in his hand and described rapidly the way to reach her home. "Now I know you never broke your word," she whispered as she stepped back in the basement again.

Fearing that the slight delay she had caused in the running time of the elevator might arouse some criticism, she summoned all her courage, drew herself up with a more impressive air than she had ever yet assumed, and addressed the starter.

"I was glad to recognize that elevator boy of yours," she said with condescension, "he comes from my home town."

"Yes, Madam," the man answered.

"He is thoroughly trustworthy," she went on, "I know, for he has worked in my family."

"I thought he was a good boy," the man said, bowing to her, "but we are always grateful for further references."

Hertha nodded and made her way out.

It was not until she was almost at her doorstep that she remembered that she had failed to buy the top.

"I'm glad I didn't tell Bob I was getting it for him," she thought remorsefully, "but how should I remember it when I met Tom-of-the-Woods himself!"

During dinner, Mrs. Pickens, as she looked at Hertha from time to time, sitting silently in her place, thought she had never seemed so lovely. Too often of late she had been worried and tired; to-night her face expressed a glad content, her pale cheeks were pink with color, and every now and then a look of expectancy came into her eyes. Something had happened, of this her landlady felt sure, and she regretted that she was going out and could not properly interrogate her pretty boarder.

We love to speak of the maternal instinct, counting it an attribute of every mother who looks down upon her new-born child; yet in the eyes of many women the madonna look never comes however many children they bring into the world. But Hertha was of no such stock. Her mother had turned toward Death when the gift that she had brought into the world might no longer rest in the hollow of her arm. To her daughter, life glowed purest when looking into the eyes of a child. And in the care and companionship of the first baby that she had carried—a squirming lump in its little white frock, its brown feet kicking futilely against her body, its brown head resting upon her shoulder—she had begun to be about her motherly business. It was the madonna look that Mrs. Pickens saw in Hertha's eyes, the look of pride that her baby was growing up as he should, and of intense anticipation at the talk that she would have with him again.

But when the dinner was over, when Mrs. Pickens had gone out and the others had retired to their rooms, a worried expression came into Hertha's face. She was in the North where color prejudice was not extreme, but she was also in a southern home and she could not decide in what spot to meet her visitor. As she sat in her room she half laughed, half cried over it. Probably in all the house there was no one who, if she explained the situation, would not be glad to have her receive a visit from a boy who had lived in her home town and who could bring her news of her old friends there—such old friends—whether he were black or white. And yet in the whole house there did not seem to be a proper spot in which to receive him. From the kitchen, presided over by a cross and busy white cook, to her bedroom, where only if he were a servant he might enter, he had no rightful place. And in the street or the park—she gasped at the thought of what others would think. There really seemed no possible number of appropriate square feet, except perhaps in the hall.

Eight o'clock found her in the parlor, the lamp sending a circle of light from the round table in the middle of the room, the last glow of twilight entering through the long windows. Hertha sat at one of them watching the passers-by, eager and anxious, her heart swelling with love for her old home and for the people there for whom she was hungry, hungry as a baby is hungry for its mother's breast. The rooms of the cabin, empty in her dream, were all inhabited now, the door wide open, Mammy moving about washing the dishes, Ellen at work setting up sums for her children at school. Outside the chickens were pecking amid the white sand. The chords of memory were ringing louder and louder, ringing with an intensity that came from their long suppression, calling up pictures of the past, striking now a note of happiness, more often a deeper one of pain. The life of the last nine months was disappearing, drifting into a mist of nothingness, and Hertha Williams was sitting in Mrs. Pickens' boarding-house parlor, watching for a substantial earthly presence out of the life of the past.

"Miss Ogilvie," a voice said from the hallway, "there's a colored boy downstairs who says he's got something for you. He says he's Tom."

"Tom!" said Hertha with a start. Her surprise was no dissimulation. She had surely expected to see him before he entered the house and she could scarcely believe he was really in it. "Why, yes," she stammered, "if it's Tom he's from my old home. Tell him to come up here."

"Tom," the cook called as she went down the stairway, "the young lady says you're to come along." And with this invitation she went back to her work.

Hertha, as she stood there in the parlor, her hands on her boy's shoulders, looking into his face, his good face with its serious forehead, its kindly mouth, believed that even Dick, were he there, must cease his nasty screeching about niggers and see that boys were boys, black or white, and that here was a young American of whom to be proud.

"Oh, Tom," she said as she sat down, and looked at him where he stood in front of her, "You're so good to see!" And again, "Oh, Tom, it's so good, so good to see you!"

"Now you've got to take that chair and tell me every bit of news," she announced when she had stared her fill.

"Reckon that would take quite a space," he answered cheerfully.

"Sit down," Hertha commanded but with a quaver in her voice.

"Oh, I couldn't sit down," Tom answered in an argumentative way. "I's clean forgotten how. I stand so long in the corner of the car, with one hand on the wheel like this," imitating his position in the elevator, "and one arm going out like this," opening and shutting an imaginary door, "that I reckon I'll soon be doing it in my sleep. It ain't natural for an elevator boy to sit."

Hertha's mouth drooped, and yet her heart glowed at her boy's thoughtfulness. From his entrance at the basement door until he left she knew he would look after her and see that she suffered nothing from his presence in her white home.

"Tell me first if they're all well?" she asked.

"Yes'm, they're doing nicely. Mammy's been ailing some this winter, Ellen says, but she's a heap better now."

"What's been the matter?" Hertha questioned sharply.

"Oh, just ailing," Tom said vaguely. "There ain't anything rightly the matter."

"But she's better now?"

"Oh, yes, and Ellen's had a good year at school and the hens are laying. Mammy told about the eggs they had for Sunday breakfast."

"Truly?" Hertha said. "What Sunday?"

"Last Sunday," Tom answered and drew a letter from Ellen out of his pocket.

As he read her all the homely news of the school and cabin her eyes filled with tears though she did not let them fall; only when he was done she asked for the letter and received it.

"And now," she demanded, turning on Tom with a show of severity, "what are you doing in New York? Don't you know you ought to be in school?"

"Yes'm," he answered, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and smiling ingratiatingly.

"What's happened?" Hertha's voice changed from one of severity to one of curiosity.

"Well," Tom made answer, "it weren't such a great show there, so I up and left."

"I didn't suppose you'd do such a thing! What was the matter anyway?"

"They was always rushing a feller. They didn't give yer any time to think."

"Tom!" Hertha broke into laughter, such peals of laughter that the cook, back in the kitchen, listened and smiled as she wrung out her dishcloth, glad that her favorite in the house, who never made a mite of trouble, was having a good time.

"It weren't a bad place," Tom went on, indulgent to the school, not wishing to do it an injustice, "there's some as likes to jump about like a chicken with its head cut off, but I like a chance to think. You'd have found it right pretty, Hertha—a river not so big as ours but full of lights at sunset. The trees were fine, too, with bigger leaves than we have, and when winter come it was white with snow."

"Oh, I know about that," Hertha interrupted. "I was out in the first snowstorm this winter, and on a sled, too. Did you go coasting, Tom?"

"No, ma'am!" His negative was emphatic. It precluded the possibility that even, for a moment, he had indulged in such a pastime. And after the spoken word he shook his head some seconds in further denial.

"It were this-a-way," he went on, "they thought as there weren't a minute of the day that a feller could have to himself. I reckon they do that way in the army, an' we wore army clothes—play clothes though, for we didn't have no guns. You'd get up in the morning after a cat-nap, an' go about your tasks till breakfast, and when you'd eaten that up an' more too, there'd be drill and lessons and Lord knows what all, I can't remember such a long while as this. But by and by there'd come a minute when the bell didn't ring and a fellow would think he could stop to study something. Perhaps he'd sit on a bench and try to figure out what was in his mind when an officer'd come along and call out, 'What you doing?'"

"And I know what you'd say," Hertha cried, interrupting him. "You'd say, 'I was thinking——'" imitating his drawl.

"Yes'm. And then he'd say, 'Get up, man, and go to work. This ain't no place to think.'

"Well, it was like that all day. I went into chapel, a mighty fine building, you could put most of the cabins at home in it without crowding, and I sat down there alone on the back seat, jes' studying the world here an' the world ter come. I hadn't been there a minute when the Captain comes up and says sharp-like, 'What you doin' here?' 'Jes' thinkin',' I says. 'Can't have that,' he says, 'this ain't no place to think. Go to work!' I walks down under the trees at sunset an' watches the pink turn into soft purple, studying ter find the first star, when some one comes along and calls out, 'Get up, man! Don't sit still like that. Go to work!' At night, when every one's in bed, I thought they'd let up, so I looked out the window. The moon was sailing past the stars, you know, and I was studying it out the way we used ter, and thinking, thinking—But, Lord, 'What you up at this time of night for, boy? 'the officer asks, tapping me on the arm. 'Jes' thinkin',' I answers. 'You can't do that here,' says he, 'no time for thinking. Go to bed!' So then I studies how to come to New York and after a while I gets here."

Tom finished his recital and smiled down at his listener.

"But Tom," Hertha asked, "wasn't Ellen terribly disappointed?"

"She's reconciled," he said dryly.

Hertha thought of Ellen and the wreckage of her plans, and surmised that there must have been a stormy period before reconciliation.

"It seems strange, Tom," she said at length, "that you should be here in New York alone."

"I ain't alone," he replied, "not exactly alone. I's boarding with a lady from the South."

"Why, that's just the way it is with me," Hertha said. "Isn't that odd!"

"Do you get enough to eat?" Tom asked.

"Plenty. Don't you?"

"Oh, I suppose so," the boy said tolerantly. "It stand ter reason city folks can't feed you like they do at home. When you have to put down a nickel or a dime for every mite o' food you buy, for every pinch o' corn meal, and every orange, it comes hard to set much on the table. And if a feller goes out to one o' these restaurants to feed, why before he's reached the pie, if he don't look out, he's eat up his day's wages."

"Eaten, Tom."

"Yes'm, eaten."

"I do hope you aren't going to be careless in the way you talk, Tom. I hope you haven't learned a lot of new slang."

"Yes'm."

"You look well, anyway!" Hertha said, surveying him carefully.

She was pleased not only at his good health, but at the way he dressed, the evident care he had taken to be neat and cleanly. Her pride in him grew for she could see that he had improved as he had taken on responsibility. Evidently it had thus far worked well for him to break loose from his women folk and school and to shift for himself.

"What you doing, Hertha?" Tom questioned.

She told him a little of her life, her pleasant room upstairs, her work at stenography. But she preferred to listen, and before long he was again the chief talker, retailing every bit of news, no matter how trivial, that had come in the letters from home. Her eagerness was so evident, and her happiness in seeing him so apparent, that Tom wondered to himself why she had never given them the chance to communicate with her during the months she had been away. As though she sensed his question she said, hesitating, the blood rushing to her cheeks:

"You mustn't think I didn't want to hear from everybody; I did so much. And I sent them cards at Christmas that I was well. Were you at school then?"

For answer he drew from his pocket her gift, and spun the top a moment on his sleeve when it fell to the floor. Hertha picked it up as she had picked up so many of his toys and put it in his brown hand where it descended to his pocket again. She was standing now, looking into his face. "Mammy told me," she said, "not to try to live in two worlds, not until I was sure fixed in the new one and," shaking her head, "it takes a long time to get fixed. But that wasn't the only reason. If I'd written and they'd answered—it's such a little place, sometimes not half-a-dozen letters in the post office—why, every one in Merryvale would have known where I was."

She hesitated, blushing, but she had said enough. The look of anger on the boy's face recalled suddenly to her remembrance the Sunday that they had stopped on the porch of the great house and Lee Merryvale had tried to send Tom home alone. Did he guess the shame of the weeks after his departure, weeks that all her pride had not been able wholly to push from her memory? She shrank at his rough answer.

"You're right," he said. "I's glad you won't have nothing to do with that skunk."

There was a rush of feet on the kitchen stairs, and Bob surprised them both by plunging into the room.

"What are you doing up so late?" Hertha demanded, but Bob did not hear her.

"Miss Ogilvie," he said, all excitement, "the cook told me that Tom is here."

"Yes," Hertha answered, and then with a gesture of introduction, dropping into the phraseology of home said, "Bob, meet Tom."

The little boy showed a moment's surprise, then accepting the race of his hero, Tom-of-the-Woods, as a simple fact, asked eagerly, "Did you bring your top?"

Tom, surprised at this greeting, brought out the top again.

"Come along," Bob cried, and leading the way they all three went out of the house down the stoop.

"You must do awfully well," Hertha whispered as under the street lamp the hero of her story began slowly to wind his string.

"What you been giving him?" he asked, nodding to the little boy whose gleaming blue eyes and intense interest in the proceedings augured more than the mere pleasure in seeing a top spin.

"I've just been telling him a few things," she answered lightly.

She stood on the steps and watched with delight Tom's careful choice of the best spot on the pavement for his spin and smiled to see the two boy-faces, one so pink and white, the other so brown, each intent on the business in hand.

It was a queer trick. Despite the many times Hertha had seen it, she was never quite sure at what moment the top, spinning at a marvelous pace, was caught up by the spinner to disappear in his pocket. And if she felt the illusion, despite her familiarity with it, there was no question but that Bob in the dim light, looking for the miraculous, found it. He regarded Tom as a magician and only hoped for some new manifestation of his power when he straightened himself up and stood before them.

"I must go now," he said.

He looked up at Hertha who stood on the step above him.

"Tom," she said, trying to delay him, "do you go to church?"

"Of course!"

"To Siloam?"

"How'd you guess that?"

"It's the biggest church in town."

Tom smiled. "I reckon you know'd I wouldn't go to any but a big one while I was about it."

"And when you write home tell them all about me, won't you?"

"Yes."

"And we won't lose track of one another again."

He did not reply to this, but with a smile for her and a nod to Bob, walked with his slow, steady gait down the street. Hertha stood by her doorstep fearing to go farther, but Bob tore after his hero and with short, trotting steps that sometimes became a run, accompanied him to the street car, watching as he was carried away out of his sight.

When he came back he found Hertha standing just where he had left her.

"Say, Miss Ogilvie," he questioned, "is it staying in the woods so much makes him black?"

"Why do you ask!" Hertha said sharply; "don't you like him the way he is?"

"Oh, I don't care," Bob replied in a catholic spirit; and added meditatively: "In the Arabian Nights all the genii are black."

---

CHAPTER XXIX

There are some who make decisions with the sure swiftness of a sensitive film, one moment a blank, the next, by a flash of light, a picture, incisive and clear. Such people, though they may make their share of mistakes, lead on the whole a comfortable existence. But there are others who, like the southern girl occupying the second-story back-room of Mrs. Pickens' boarding-house, find it difficult to determine for themselves the course which they shall take. And to these who wander in the valley of indecision the right path to follow becomes daily more obscured. The more they question the more they are beset with obstacles, mists gather about them, and some have been known to wait in hesitancy, until, without having tasted of adventure, they find that their day is done.

Hertha, however difficult decision might be to her, had determined not to be in this latter group. When her school work was over, she had resolved to settle upon her future; but in the days that followed Tom's visit, when with her lover away there was a chance to stop and think, she had to confess to herself that the paths down which she looked were none of them to her liking. And yet she must apparently choose one of two alternatives or else after seven months of trial start in again with lessened fortune, without a profession and alone.

As she sat at her books late one afternoon, endeavoring to indite a business letter she looked up to find Miss Wood standing at her open door.

"Excuse me," Miss Wood said, "I know you are at work but I wanted to leave you some of my roses. One of our cases—a woman who got into trouble—brought them to me from the country to-day. She did the sensible thing (so few will) and went away with her child to work at domestic service; and now she can come in for the day and leave me something as lovely as this." And she held out a spray of rambler roses.

Hertha took the gift with a shy word of thanks, and after placing the flowers in water invited Miss Wood to sit down.

"No, I'm not going to interrupt you," the older woman said.

"You aren't interrupting," Hertha answered. "Especially," she added, "as I want very much to ask your advice."

To be asked to assume the role of adviser is the most subtle of compliments; and Miss Wood, while murmuring that she feared she would be of little use, took Hertha's rocking-chair by the window and proceeded to look self-conscious, as though she might thus exude wisdom.

"Do you think," Hertha asked, sitting on the little straight white chair opposite Miss Wood, "do you think that it needs any special talent to be a stenographer?"

She put her question hesitatingly, playing the while with her hands, a habit that had lately come to her with the city's insistent hurry and nervous demand for quick thought. Her day at school had been a hard one and only a walk with Bob had brought back courage to face life.

"I certainly think," Miss Wood answered, "that there are plenty of stenographers in New York to-day without talent. I've had some of them work for me."

"Yes," said Hertha with a little smile, "but you wouldn't want me to be that sort!"

The assistant secretary of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Destitute had her share of humor. Smiling back at her interlocutor she proceeded to give Hertha's question the thought it deserved.

"Where do you feel that your talent falls short?" she demanded.

"Oh, everywhere," Hertha answered vaguely, and then added, "it's all so confusing, especially when you have to hurry."

"You haven't been at work long enough to be speeded," her adviser answered. "Perhaps they aren't teaching you well."

"The others get ahead." In the answer lurked a hint of tears.

"I don't believe, then," Miss Wood said, weighing her words carefully, "that you will want to be a stenographer; that is, a stenographer whose whole time is taken up with typewriting and dictation. But you can be a secretary with only moderate skill at stenography if you have other qualifications."

"Probably I haven't got them," Hertha murmured.

"I know you have some of them." Miss Wood became emphatic now, she felt on safe ground. "You have an attractive personality. Why, I should try you in my office, if I had one of my own, the first minute I saw you! You would be courteous to all who came in, and discreet; you wouldn't talk about your employer's business when you went home; and," looking about her, "you are orderly. Oh, you have many qualifications." The last words were vague but Miss Wood left her listener cheered and with returned self-respect. Especially was Hertha pleased that a woman, not a smirking man, expressed a desire to employ her if given the opportunity.

Unfortunately, the next day, in her tussle with a business order, she made such a hodge-podge of words that her teacher laughed. That evening she knocked at Mrs. Pickens' door.

She was welcomed cordially to a comfortable seat while her landlady hastily gathered together the bunch of newspapers that she had been looking over and threw them into a corner.

"What have you been reading about to-night?" Hertha questioned. "A young woman who doesn't know her own mind?"

"I reckon there're plenty of that sort," was the answer, "or if they do know what they want they'll never get it. I just read a modest advertisement in which a refined young woman, graduating from a school of stenography, says she wants a position with an agreeable gentleman. Hours short. How would you like that now?"

"I might like it, but I reckon after he tried me with one of his letters he wouldn't like me."

"Nonsense, then he wouldn't be agreeable."

Hertha was silent, and Mrs. Pickens, seeing that she was in no mood for banter, asked sympathetically, "You're mighty tired, honey?"

Her voice with its southern drawl reminded Hertha poignantly of her mammy. She longed childishly to put her head on the older woman's shoulder as she would have put it on her colored mother's, and be comforted. But she remained in her seat and answered with the single word, "Discouraged."

"It's too hot to work," Mrs. Pickens said soothingly. "I've managed myself to-day to spoil ten pounds of perfectly good fruit."

"What a shame!" Hertha was alert at the disaster. "Why wasn't I here to help you! I know how to cook."

"You're a clever girl. You know the things you ought to know which is a lot more than I do, having been spoilt in my youth. And the things you don't know aren't worth worrying over."

"I don't seem to know how to earn my own living."

"Let some one, who wants to, earn it for you then."

In the silence that followed Mrs. Pickens devoutly hoped that her bluntness had not hurt Dick's cause.

"Of course I can support myself," Hertha said at length in a low voice, "I have already been a companion. I would rather do that again than just to marry for a home. How do you know you are going to like the home you get? If you're a companion you can leave it, but if you're married you're expected to stay on no matter how much you may hate every step you take and dread the thought of to-morrow!"

"Of course," Mrs. Pickens made haste to say, in some consternation, "you mustn't marry if you feel like that!"

Hertha's voice was hardly audible. "I don't feel that way about Dick to-day, but I don't know how I might feel to-morrow."

Her valley of indecision was black indeed; but Bob came to say good-night and she forgot it for a time in her happiness with the child.

June flowered with tropical luxuriance in the city park. Wonderful blue lilies, that Cleopatra might have inhaled for fragrance, floated on the little pond by the side of their less foreign white and yellow neighbors. Roses of all varieties and color grew in straight lines in the Italian garden. Rhododendrons massed the hillside, gorgeous rose color, and honeysuckle and sweet-smelling shrubs lined the paths or clambered over the rustic arbors. There were times when Hertha, country lover that she was, sighed at the studied prettiness of it all and waxed weary at the constant stream of people who never gave Bob or herself a chance to be alone, but it was much better than the view of the East-side elevated; so, though she had made no friend whom she loved as she loved Kathleen, she did not regret her change of residence. But during each day, in the outing that she allowed herself, far back in her mind, whether feeding the ducks and goldfish or retailing a new phase in the history of Tom-of-the-Woods, there was a sense of irksome responsibility, of the necessity shortly of deciding upon the next step in life.

"I had a letter from Dick to-day," Mrs. Pickens announced to Hertha one evening in the third week of his departure.

She had not mentioned him before, except casually, since the night they had talked in her room.

"What does he say?" Hertha asked.

They were sitting out on the stoop, for the evening was a warm one.

"Oh, nothing very much," Mrs. Pickens answered, "chiefly joking about the dreadful food he gets and how glad he will be to come home."

"Men do care a lot about what they have to eat."

"They surely do. I suppose it's partly because after their work they're hungry, really hungry, and food tastes good to them. I work, too, but when I've been over this house, from top to bottom, and seen that Mary doesn't spoil everything she puts her hand to, I haven't the least desire for my dinner."

"You take it all very hard," Hertha said.

"Do I? Well, I suspect that's because I am incompetent, like Mary, and it makes me nervous and doubly anxious over everything."

"That's the way I feel in class."

Mrs. Pickens glanced anxiously at the young girl noting how fragile-looking she had grown in the past weeks.

"You seemed so well when you came here," she said, "and now you are certainly thin. I hope it isn't my incompetence that has brought the change about."

"You know it isn't," the girl answered.

There was a pleasant silence in which neither felt the necessity of speech and then out of the fast approaching darkness Hertha asked: "Have you spent the most of your life in New York?"

"No, I only came here after my marriage. My life has been an ordinary one. A quiet girlhood, fifteen years of perfect married life, and now, a common struggle to keep from being despondent and to make both ends meet. The best for me is done."

"Fifteen years wasn't very long, was it?"

"One way it seems about fifteen minutes but another way it seems an eternity. It was all my life—I'm only existing now. And do you know," speaking in a low voice into the twilight, "I've never said this before, hardly to myself, but I came very near not marrying my husband. I was young and not romantically in love. He was ten years older and that seemed frightening. If it had not been for my mother, who appreciated him better than I, I doubt if I would have accepted him. Afterward, when we had lived together for months and I had given my whole heart to him, I used to waken in the night and shake with horror at the thought of what I might have lost. When I realized what we would have missed without our life together, I would grow chill with a perfectly unreasoning fear.

"I asked him once if he had ever questioned that he wanted me," Mrs. Pickens went on, "and he laughed and said not since the first May morning when I came to church in a blue gown and sat across the aisle from him. He surely knew his mind, but that's often the difference between men and women!"

Another silence and then Mrs. Pickens went within.

Hertha lingered trying to conceive of a love that had in it no romance and yet blossomed into passionate devotion. And as she strove to imagine such a condition, as she called up Dick's image and saw him playing with her in the snow, sitting by her at the opera, rowing with her in the park, her brain proved for a time obedient; and then the air was suddenly filled with the scent of orange blossoms.

"Oh, it's no use," she said despairingly, "I can't decide." And then in a tremor of excitement and determination, "Next Sunday I mean to have one more talk with Tom."

---

CHAPTER XXX

The usher at Siloam Church gave a second glance at the very pretty girl whom with considerable ceremony he escorted to a seat. He did not for a moment think of her as white, else resisting her request to remain in the rear he would have placed her in the front pew; but he recognized her as a stranger and wondered as he continued his duties where she might hail from, and whether she might not be persuaded to regard Siloam as her future church home.

Hertha, her curly hair pushed well about her face, sat in the corner of a seat and scanned the congregation for Tom. She saw him after a few moments in the middle of the center aisle, his forehead knit a little as he followed the service, his whole posture one of comfortable repose. He was enjoying his Sunday rest and, as a preacher's son should, found the church a natural place in which to make himself at home. Hertha thought she heard his voice as the congregation sang the Gospel hymn, and so happy was she watching him that she looked sideways slyly to his seat as with bowed head she listened to the prayer.

"Bless all Thy people, Lord," the preacher was saying, his rich, powerful voice filling the great church like the notes of the organ. "We ask Thy blessing upon us in this our hour of worship. Bless those who live in our midst and those who have come from afar. May they be guided by Thy voice and profited by Thy holy word. Bless all those who are in any ways in affliction or in distress. Send them Thy heavenly light that shines in the eternal brightness of Thy countenance and make plain to them the way of salvation."

"I have come from afar," Hertha thought, "and I surely need guidance." And in reverent attitude she strove to secure the blessing of which the preacher spoke. But the church with its dark-faced congregation recalled her past, and the past brought continually back to her her present problem. She looked over toward Tom and smiled to think that the boy, who when a baby, she had hushed as he lay cuddled up to her in church, should be one to whom she went for counsel. She only dimly realized that to her he was not only her brother, but also the member of a race that she understood better than she as yet understood the white race of which she was now a part. Before the service was over and the preacher's voice gave its last "Amen," she found that the familiar scene, the religious phraseology with its well-worn metaphor but also with its vivid beauty, stirred her to tragic homesickness and brought the hot tears to her eyes.

"Tom!" She had slipped from the detaining hand of the Missionary Sister, a large middle-aged woman who welcomed her effusively to the church, and stopped her boy as he reached the door.

He looked at her in astonishment. "There ain't nothing happened?" he asked in alarm.

"Oh, no," she answered, laughing nervously and moving to one side to let the people pass. "Only that I need to talk with you."

"I don't know where we can go." He stood perplexed, his forehead drawn in thought. His first alarm over it seemed to Hertha that he did not wish to see her and she was hurt to the quick.

"We can walk in the square."

Tom shook his head.

"Yes we can!" she declared, the tears in her eyes. "We've often walked out together." The service with the memories that it called up had shaken her. She had felt her lips trembling more than once this morning and now a rebuff was hard to bear.

"Jes' wait a minute," Tom said. "I'm thinking."

The familiar phrase sent back the tears and brought a smile. Realizing that she must bide her time and confident that Tom would find a way out of any difficulty she stood aside, watching the congregation as it stopped to speak with friend or neighbor or went quickly on its way.

It was the first time she had been to a Negro quarter since her advent to New York and in a short two hours she was wholly at home. Happy in the welcome that came from one after another in the congregation, her loneliness disappeared, and she returned "good mornings" without embarrassment. Before Tom had finished his thinking, two little brown-skinned girls, whose spotless white dresses and gaily flowered white hats were not more fresh and bright than their shining faces, made friends with her. They stood, one on either hand, fingering her dress, and the younger, who was an alert child, asked more than one pertinent question. "Where you run to, chillen?" their mother demanded as she came up, and the soft dialect made Hertha feel as though the query had been addressed to her. As the little girls moved away she turned the question over in her mind, asking it of herself. In these seven months since she had closed the door upon the colored world what path had she taken, down what road had she been running, with whom had she stopped to talk on her way? Naturally mistrustful of herself, she began to question whether she had done any better than one of these children who stopped with her for a moment and then ran on to some new happening.

"I bin fixing to stay here," Tom said coming up to her after a few minutes' absence. "The sexton, he's a friend of mine, and if I lock up after me I can stay right on in the church."

It was a pleasant place to stop for a talk. The windows were open, the air was fresh, and though this auditorium was far larger and more sumptuous than any they had been accustomed to in their childhood, it seemed a natural and good spot for a sober chat.

"Perhaps I'd better tell you about everything that's happened," Hertha declared as they sat down well at the front. Tom nodded assent, and she began her narrative, haltingly at first, but, as she went on, filling it with incidents of her life with Kathleen, her work in the factory, and her decision to move and to study a profession. On her failure to do good work at stenography she laid much emphasis and ended by asking for advice regarding the best way to earn her living.

Tom looked at her soberly and yet somewhere back she felt that there was a hint of a smile.

"You haven't told me about your feller," he declared after she had finished.

During her recital Hertha had been looking straight ahead at the pulpit with its reading-desk and red plush cushion on which rested a huge Bible. Now she turned in her seat and addressed herself directly to Tom.

"What do you know about him?" she asked.

"Nothin'," Tom replied, the smile that Hertha had felt in the background coming to the surface. "It wouldn't be anything but natural if you had a dozen. But Bob told me you had one."

"Bob! How did you have time enough to exchange confidences like that?"

"There weren't any exchange. Before he'd finished the car come. I reckon he was planning to have me give a wave of my hand and send the feller off the earth. What did you give him, Hertha? The kid thought I was a magician."

"Oh, I just told him a story," Hertha answered vaguely, "and used your name. But what did Bob mean? Didn't he like Dick?"

"Jealous, I reckon."

Hertha laughed. "Well, I'll tell you about him," she declared, "I was coming to him when I spoke."

Playing with her handkerchief, her mouth trembling sometimes as she talked, she seemed to Tom both nervous and tired. He had not thought she could so lose her old serenity. But he listened attentively as she told of her meetings with Dick in the library and at the park. As her story continued he grew to like the young southerner for his considerate and unselfish devotion. Looking at Hertha's too slender figure and at her restless hands he felt, as Dick so often felt, that she was not one who should be forced to battle with the world. And he knew, as Dick could not know, her utter loneliness. When he learned that the man was from Georgia he was not altogether unprepared for the close of Hertha's story, the quick breath and furious blush that came with the halting effort to tell of her lover's attitude toward the colored race.

"Oh, I can guess," he said tolerantly, coming to her rescue. "I've heard that kind of man talk. Colored folks are all niggers to him and he ain't got no use for 'em. But lawdy, that don't amount to much."

"But I think it does, Tom," Hertha said tremulously. "When he talks like that, I hate him."

"Have you told him about yourself, Sister?" Tom inquired.

He spoke low, almost in a whisper, looking about him.

"No," was the answer.

"Wouldn't it be easier?"

"Perhaps." And then with a touch of annoyance, "You know how I hate to talk."

"But I wouldn't marry him——"

"Of course!" Hertha stopped playing with her handkerchief and clasped her hands together. "If I decide to marry him of course I'll tell. But I haven't decided, I can't seem to decide!"

Tom looked at her flushed face and said in his slowest, most comforting tone: "What you got to hurry for? Can't a man wait for a girl to take her time? He ain't worth much if he can't."

"But don't you see," Hertha said excitedly, "I can't wait and wait, I've got to decide what I'm going to do. If I have to support myself all the rest of my life I ought to know whether I'm going to be a secretary or not. And then it's easy enough to say to take your time about deciding whether you like a man, but Dick Brown keeps taking things so for granted. And then, just when he seems quite nice, he'll break out with something about the 'niggers' that makes me so angry I can't bear to speak to him again."

"That ain't the worst kind though." Tom spoke with emphasis, a grim look settling about his big mouth. "You can face the one that hates you. The worst is the skulking kind that looks sweet and friendly and acts the devil behind your back."

Again Hertha heard him flay the man to whom she had so unreservedly given her love, and again she shrank from his bitter words. But sitting there in the church, with the homely symbols of religious life about her, with the sun streaming through the crude stained-glass windows, she saw clearly the danger and the sin from which she had escaped. And she saw too that Tom, her young but manly brother, would hate with an animal-like intensity the man who should dare to do her an injury. She listened with deepened respect to what he went on to say.

"You can't make a Georgia cracker like Negroes, Hertha, not if you was to work on him all your life. If you find you get to love him, tell him everything and then let it drop. There ain't no good in going over things. Up here in the North nobody thinks much about folks' past, they're too busy. If he's good to you, and works hard and plays square, there ain't no need for you to worry because he can't see like you do. He ain't good enough for you, of course. No man is. But a husband ain't to be judged by his opinions on the race question."

He touched her arm gently in a caress. "It has to be good-by, Sister," he went on, "the white world don't meet the colored world to-day. Look at this church here. It's close to white folks' homes but no one ever thinks to come in to worship. I've sat here and thought of it many times. We ain't really men and women to them. I reckon they don't think we're children of God."

"That's it," Hertha cried, "and how could I live with any one who thought that?"

"They all think it," Tom answered.

"No, they don't," said Hertha angrily; "my teachers didn't at school."

"They were women," Tom replied. "Women have more religion than men."

He rose from his seat and stretched himself, his long arms extended, his short coat-sleeves revealing a great expanse of wrist and hand.

"What are you growing so tall for?" Hertha asked, looking up at him.

"I reckon I have to." He dropped his arms to his sides. "It's a mistake fer it takes a lot of coat and pants to cover me, and in the bed the sheet don't come up high enough and the blanket's forever slipping by on the floor."

"Oh, you'll get sick," his former sister and nurse cried, looking so troubled that Tom had to laugh.

"Don't you worry," he answered, smiling down at her, "I've had such a good bringing up that I can't go wrong now, not anyways."

Nothing that he could have said would have meant so much. She accepted his words in their fullest meaning and felt uplifted, comforted. Whatever she might make of her own life, she had helped wisely to mold his. If she never saw him again she would know that her influence would stay with him to the end, blossoming in honorable thoughts and kindly deeds.

"And so you advise me to marry?" she said, rising too and trying to speak with a laugh.

"No, ma'am!" with decision. "I ain't advising you to marry. I's just advising you not to give up marrying."

"Well," with a little shrug, "it amounts to the same thing."

"What you got to hurry for?" Tom returned to his old charge.

"If I don't decide I can't stay where I am. There is Miss Wood one evening telling me to go on with my work—she loathes Dick—and Mrs. Pickens the next telling me to accept a good husband. That's what it's like when Dick's away, and it's a million times harder when he's around. I'll move if I give him up.

"I met an old man this winter," she went on, "a friend of Kathleen's. He had a terrible philosophy, everything was going to the dogs. You'd have thought that the world would never get any better. But he said one thing to me. He told me to dance and have a good time and to be sure to keep out of the conflict. That was the way he put it, 'Keep out of the conflict.'"

"That might be good advice if you could."

"I suppose you could," Hertha said slowly, "if you made up your mind to; just to have an easy, comfortable time. Now Kathleen was always in the conflict. She was trying to change the world, to change everybody—at least everybody who was poor. And here I can't decide what to do with my own life."

"It's a heap easier," Tom remarked meditatively, "to run other folks' lives than it is your own."

They had walked down the aisle to the corridor and now stood by the closed door.

"I haven't made my mind up yet about marriage," Tom said. "It's a great risk, it sure is. I was reading the other day about trial marriages. Seemed like that might not be a bad idea—each agree to try each other out for a time and then if things suited, match up for good."

"Where did you read that?" Hertha asked, curiosity surmounting disapproval in her voice.

"In the paper," was the all-sufficient answer. "It were only a suggestion."

"Was, Tom."

"Yes'm."

"I'm afraid it's a suggestion that most people would think wicked," she gave a resigned sigh, "like divorce. Well, I'm glad we had this talk."

"So am I," Tom made hearty response. "And that wasn't a bad idea, Hertha, to keep out of the conflict."

"There's one thing I want you to promise me," the girl's thoughts turned from herself to her old home. "I want you to promise to let me keep in touch with you. You're nearer than the folks down South. Promise that you won't go away without my knowing."

"Sure," he answered.

"And one thing more, if you hear from them at home that any one is ill, or that they're going to move, you must let me know. I mean to write to them before long, I'm going to settle a lot of things in my mind when school's over, but I rely on you to let me know the news."

"Yes."

"It's a promise?"

"Yes, Hertha, it's a promise."

She put her hand in his to say good-by. "You're my boy, you remember." There was a world of gentleness and love in her voice. "Do you know, I told Kathleen and then Dick that I had a brother, a little brother who was in school."

"I's feared you shouldn't have said that, Hertha."

"I had to have some relatives, didn't I? And I just naturally had you. And we'll never forget one another. And I tell you," looking with wet eyes back down the long aisle of the church to where the Bible lay on the reading-desk, "I know what heaven's going to be like. It isn't going to have any golden streets. Think how horrid and hard and glaring they'd be! It will have spreading trees and flowers, lilies and asphodels and green grass—yes, and white sand; and I engage you now to go out walking with me the first Sunday."

The tears were in his eyes as well as hers. "I'll love to be there waiting fer you, Sister," he answered.

She gripped him in her arms for a moment and then with a gulping sob opened the door and went out into the street.

---

CHAPTER XXXI

"Keep out of the conflict!"

This admonition ran through Hertha's mind as she went to school Monday morning. She saw herself standing at the little table in the restaurant with the cynical old major looking at her kindly, admiringly. The conflict to which he had alluded had been that of the working-class, but his words might include all battle whether of labor or of race. If she married Dick she would be out of the conflict, out of the eternal worry of earning a living. But she would also be out of the conflict of race, forever removed from the life that had been hers such a short time ago. If she accepted the love of this young man from Georgia with his talk of "black wenches" and "buck niggers," she accepted complete ostracism from her past. And not only ostracism,—she had grown to realize that this was likely whatever course she chose,—but the past that had meant so much, that had helped to make her what she was, gentle-mannered, deft, well-educated, this past she must see despised. Dick might forgive those years but only if she would forget them. He would be ambitious for them both, and she must blot from her mind everything that touched upon the shocking disgrace, for so he would account it, of her world until eight months ago.

Sophie Switsky was in the conflict still, battling with the oppression that centered about her whirring machine. Kathleen was in it, demanding sunshine and health for the many in poverty. But if Hertha Williams married a Georgia cracker she left her conflict, turned from the battlefield into a place of quiet and safety. Ellen had predicted that when her sister went into the white world she would never join in the coarse abuse of the colored race; but if she married Dick she tacitly linked herself to these cruel lies. She abhorred the thought, and yet, all the morning, on her way to work and seated in the ill-ventilated classroom, she found the major's advice buzzing through her head, "Keep out of the conflict! Keep out of the conflict!"

In the afternoon, walking in the park with Bob, a new idea occurred to her. Why not, when school was over, try for a position as nursery governess? Such a place would be a grade above anything open to Hertha Williams, since as a governess she would not be a servant but would be received at her mistress's table. Loving children, inclining, too, to an outdoor life, she might in this way secure a summer in the country and postpone her final decision. Tom's comfortable advice to take her time remained with her, offering encouragement to this new plan. But the difficulty in the way of securing a position, the unfamiliar machinery of employment bureau, of advertisement, made her hesitate. It would mean publicity, the answering of questions, the entering of a new and perhaps unfriendly home. She who hated change ought not to have to make her way in an unfamiliar environment so soon again.

"Tell me about Tom-of-the-Woods," Bob demanded after she had been silent for many minutes.

"No," Hertha answered.

"Aw, come on," Bob said. "Tell about the night with the owl."

"Not now!"

"Aw, come on. That's the part I like best. I bet he could see in the dark like a cat. Couldn't he now? Couldn't he see everything just the same, night or day?"

"There are the ducks!" Hertha cried, and hurried him to where the birds paddled in the lake and gave entertainment enough to push Tom-of-the-Woods into Bob's limbo of forgetfulness if not into hers.

The week went wearily on. The warm days were conducive to idleness and in her discouragement Hertha worked erratically, studying far into the evening one night to drop her books entirely the next. On Thursday as she sat in her room looking idly at the sunset light as it faded from the sky, Mrs. Pickens knocked at the door.

"May I come in?" she asked. "Don't make a light," as Hertha having given her a seat started to strike a match; "it's pleasant to talk in the dark."

The two sat near one another looking into the trees.

"I'm thinking of a plan for the summer." Hertha was the first to break the silence.

"Not one that would mean leaving here, I hope?"

"It would mean leaving here. If I needed it would you give me a recommendation as a nursery governess?"

The question was utterly unexpected, and Mrs. Pickens answered with a jest. "Certainly. Shall I count Dick as the babe whom you have been teaching?"

"I wish you wouldn't think so much about Dick!" There was irritation in the girl's tone and dropping her banter Mrs. Pickens gave assurance of her willingness to be of any service. "I suppose you want me to speak for your character," she went on, "and I can certainly answer for your disposition. You're the easiest person to get along with I ever met. But Bob's mother is the one to testify to your ability with children. You've been a godsend to her this spring. How the child has waked up. He's much brighter and more interesting than before you came."

Stirring a little in her chair, leaning against the window to look out into the approaching night, Hertha made no answer to her friend's praises and seemed to have forgotten the request that she had just made. After a little she said slowly, "I had a brother——"

"Had a brother? Why do you speak in the past? Nothing has happened to him, has there?"

"No, oh, no, but Bob makes me think of him when he was little, when he belonged to me. A little child belongs to you. Partly for that reason I'd like to be with little children."

"I'll do what I can to help you, but why not get references also from the South?"

The question was asked hesitatingly and with no small amount of inquisitiveness. The mystery of Hertha's past, that mystery that so deeply interested Dick, was growing in importance to his landlady. Perhaps this evening in the friendly dark she might be able to probe it. Despite her hope, she expected some monosyllabic reply followed by a silence that would prevent a continuance of the subject. She was totally unprepared for Hertha's frank answer.

"You can see," the girl said, "that I have no connections now in the South. No one writes to me."

"Yes?" Mrs. Pickens ventured. Her voice was tender, sympathetic, trembling with curiosity.

Hertha said nothing further but looked out where the lamps had been lighted and glowed golden against the deep trees. Fearing lest she might lose the confidential talk she was expecting, the older woman continued gently: "I've often wondered what separated you from your people. Do you want to tell me what it was?"

"Some one's sin."

The words were spoken into the night. The girl did not move her head as the older woman, with a cry, came to her.

"Your birth?" she whispered.

In the darkness Hertha nodded assent.

"Oh, my dear," stroking the soft curly head that was turned from her. "And you didn't know your people?"

"No, I was brought up among strangers."

"They were not kind to you perhaps?"

The head that Mrs. Pickens was stroking turned instantly from her touch and a voice said with a note of anger, "Not kind? They were heavenly kind. They did everything they could for me."

"You must have loved them then?"

"Of course, I loved them. I loved them better than any people in the world."

"Then you have some friends in the South whom you can turn to now, haven't you?"

The question was asked in a bright voice as though hoping to bring something of cheer to the listener.

But Hertha with a shake of her head turned away and again looked into the street.

"Have you quarreled? Somehow I can't think of you as quarreling, but I know how clans battle in the South. Did something occur to make you angry before you left? If that's so, you'll soon make it up and everything will be right again."

Hertha breathed fast. "I can't see them any more," she whispered.

"Tell me why. Perhaps I can see some way to make things right."

"You? Why, it's people like you and Dick who separate us!"

"What do you mean?" The woman rose and in the darkness tried to peer into the girl's face. "What have Dick and I to do with it?"

She groped for some clue to this enigmatic statement. What a ridiculous thing to say. What indeed had she and Dick to do with it? What unless that they were southerners? And then there flashed before her eyes a paragraph in one of the southern newspapers that she was always reading, a half-dozen lines telling of a girl hidden among the Negroes, later to receive money and a name. She saw the column in the paper, at the top of the page to the right, where the extraordinary story stood. She had a poor memory but some things she visualized unconsciously but unforgettably, and this had been one. She could see every word now, as though she were reading it, except the name.

"What have Dick and I to do with all this?" she repeated with an attempt at a laugh. "We don't believe in separating families. But it wasn't your own family of whom you were speaking, was it? Didn't they do anything for you?"

"Yes," Hertha answered. "When my grandfather died last October he left me two thousand dollars."

"Ah!"

That was all. The southern woman stood clutching a chair, her head reeling, the floor seeming to move beneath her feet. She was face to face with the incredible tale that her memory told her she must credit as the truth. The mystery then that surrounded Dick's princess, his beautiful lady to whom he gave his humble devotion, was humiliating and sordid. Disgrace, hidden by a life among Negroes. Worst of all, the smut of the blacks upon her since she desired to be with them again. This was the reason she had been so angry at Dick when he had raged against "niggers." She had lived with them in their dark alleys, she had eaten and slept with the kinky-haired slave-race!

Slowly feeling her way past the dainty white bed, Mrs. Pickens reached the door. Her hand was on the knob when Hertha struck a match. Suddenly the room was flooded with the yellow gas-light, blinding them both. The older woman put her hand over her eyes to shield them from the glare, and then resolutely drew it away and stared into Hertha's face. She expected to find some change, some sign of those former detestable surroundings. But in the bright glow of the light the girl was more exquisite than ever. She tried to speak, to announce that she knew the truth, but she could not charge this aristocratic-looking young woman with the disgrace of having lived with "niggers." Without a word she turned the knob and left the room.

Hertha looked after her, startled. She had meant to tell her whole story, but something in the silence that had followed her answer to Mrs. Pickens' last question frightened her, and too timid to speak further she had sought the comfort of the light. Then she saw her landlady, a strange, disgusted expression on her face, her nostrils distended as though detecting some distasteful smell, turn away and leave her alone.

The girl went to the window and pulled down the shade. Turning to the mirror she looked at herself in the glass. The face that looked back at her was thin and white, with sad lines about the dark eyes, but it was familiar, the same face that Mrs. Pickens had seen since she had come into this home. What was there that should make this woman gaze at her with repugnance and then go away? She pressed her hands upon her waving hair. Had she guessed something worse than the truth, something that Hertha herself had believed the truth until a short time ago? Did she think she was a Negro? If she thought that! Leaving the mirror the girl seated herself in a chair and wearily reached out to the table for the book that she was studying. But before touching it she drew back and with a gesture of pain turned and looked across the room to the closed door. A chair stood near the doorway and leaning against it again she saw her landlady, her hand gripping the back, her every feature breathing disgust. She could not rid herself of the figure, it would not leave the room. And worse, shadows were gathering about it, black shadows from which the figure shrank. They moved restlessly about, these shadows, by the door and by the bed. They stood dark in the gas-light—black faces with big, clumsy lips! black hands with red palms; heads with black, woolly hair. Shutting her eyes, she summoned all her strength to efface with life's reality the phantoms of a white world's hate. She saw her old friendly home, her mammy, Ellen, Tom. She looked into their kindly faces and touched their hands. Then with a start her eyes opened and the shadows gathered about the figure at the door.

There were noises in the room—big, deep voices, calling from between thick lips. From heavy throats came coarse words and now and then a grating laugh. The figure shrank again and gripped harder at the chair.

Why was the room so close? She had not closed the window when she had lighted the gas. But the air was full of odors, thick odors, that stifled. The figure drew back, its face drawn with disgust, trembling at contact with the fetid smell.

In her chair at the table Hertha shrank within herself. She drew up her feet, crouching against the cushions. Were they coming to her, too, these figures? She called on them to leave her, but they came on. With staring eyes she implored them to stop, to pass her by, but they only leered and drew the closer. And as they came she shrank back further in her chair.

Then for the first time in her life she felt shame at her uprearing. The home that had been sacred to her, her refuge, was defiled. The black faces danced before her eyes and she cowered, the coarse voices called and she pressed her hands over her ears. The thick odors enveloped her, and her face changed, her nostrils quivered, and with a movement of disgust she dropped her head upon the table on her outstretched arms.

In the meantime, within her room, Mrs. Pickens restlessly examined her piles of papers, seizing and discarding, searching feverishly for a date until at length, on a yellowed sheet, she found what she sought. The incredible was true. There was the forgotten name, "Ogilvie!" Viewed in print, after an hour's reflection, the story was less horrible than when it had flashed upon her in Hertha's bedroom. A judge for a grandfather was an alleviating circumstance. But the reality was bad enough. That the girl still clung to the Negroes was the worst feature. Common sense must soon show her, however, both the wickedness and the folly of such an attitude. She put the paper carefully away, resolved that Dick should see it when he came back home.

---

CHAPTER XXXII

"Dick!"

It was Friday afternoon. Hertha had returned from school, her books on her arm, happy in the realization that in one week vacation would be at hand. She had no idea that she should find Richard Brown standing in his doorway, smiling at her.

Never had he seemed so bright and attractive. He had taken off his business clothes and wore a white flannel shirt and white trousers. He looked a young happy boy, and was indeed supremely happy to be back and with her again. "Dick," she had cried and started to shift her books that she might hold out her hand. But before she could accomplish her purpose he had her in his arms. Only for a moment; so swift a moment that she could not draw away or resent it, her surprise was too great.

"I didn't do anything," he cried quickly, "I reckon we were both startled. My, but it's good to be back home! Here! let me take your books. Ain't it hot though! The first hot weather I've struck yet. Makes you think of the South only they can't get it as warm down there as up here where the sidewalks are baking all day. Guess what I saw this noon? A boy frying pancakes on the pavement. Just dropped the mixture on the hot stone and in a jiffy the cake was done, nice and brown and crisp around the edges. That beats it our way, don't it?"

He spoke with reckless extravagance, anxious to retrieve any mistake he may have made, looking at her in the meantime with devouring eyes. There was nothing that he missed, and though he did not speak of it he cursed inwardly the work that made her pale and thin and that he believed had caused the harassed expression in her face.

"You look mighty well in your new clothes," Hertha said, relieving her embarrassment by surveying with exaggerated approval his white apparel.

"Do I? Glad you like 'em. I found some of the fellows were going in for them and I thought I would. I mean to dress better anyway. A man on the road ought to have the latest thing in style and know how to carry it, too. I've improved in neckties, haven't I?"

"Indeed you have. I wish you'd give me that splotchy one. I hate it."

Going to his bureau Dick secured the offending tie and handed it out to her.

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked curiously.

"I'd like to burn it in the kitchen stove, only up here there aren't any stoves where you can burn things up. I'll have to use it for patchwork."

She smoothed the glaring red and orange silk in her hand and then, with Dick carrying her books, went to her room.

As he turned to go, nodding to her from her threshold, she again spoke of his suit. "You're ready for tennis. The men dress like that when they play here in the park."

"Do they? I'll have to play then. Don't know a thing about it, do you?"

"No, I never had a chance to play games."

"Neither did I. They didn't go in for that sort of thing where I came from. But it's never too late to learn. Can't we get a net and play this summer?"

"Perhaps."

Though she only said "perhaps," her face brightened and she looked with pleased expectance at this young man who had brought so much happiness and jollity into her life. Since she had sat on the sled and let him draw her over the snow in the city square, he had given her many gay, entertaining times.

"I'll get some rubber-soled shoes," she called out, "and you must get some too."

Brushing her hair and changing her gown need not have made her hot, but when she had finished dressing, her face was flushed and she sat down trembling. She had slept but little the past night, but more serious than lack of sleep was her new sense of shame. Of a sudden to-day in the classroom she found herself asking what the girls would think if they knew that she had a black mother, that she had eaten with her, performed for her myriad services? What would they think if she told of her black sister who for years had paid her way to school? The white world's phantoms were clouding her spirit, turning her affectionate gratitude into shrinking fear. They were standing between her and a past that she loved. And as the black shadows followed her to her work so she found them back in her room. She dreaded to look toward the door.

The trees without beckoned, and walking to the open window she looked across the street. The familiar scene brought calmness and resolution. She would tell Dick everything. No matter how difficult or humiliating it might be, it would be better to tell him herself than to try, as she had tried last night, to relate her story to some one else. And she must share her secret. She could not stay another night in this house without the comfort of self-revelation. Otherwise the shadows would drive her to sickness and despair. Dick loved her, and love carried with it sympathy and compassion. For the first time her heart warmed at the thought of his protecting affection; and with her resolution firmly taken she walked steadily, head erect, through the doorway out of her room.

It was a gay dinner-table. Mrs. Pickens, who had been constrained in her manner toward Hertha at breakfast, dropped her reserve for the time being and entered into Dick's raillery. Miss Wood was in good humor, and Dick was bubbling over with entertaining stories. He was interesting, too, in describing the country through which he had passed, and made vivid to them the small town up-state with its shaded streets, its growing shops, its dingy hotel and execrable service. The young commercial traveler had become very discriminating in regard to rooms and meals.

"Most of the waiters," he explained, "know only about ten words of English nowadays. You're lucky if you strike one who knows twenty. Once in a while I'd get a darky and you bet I was glad! Sambo's the boy for me! Serves your meals all right and sense enough to laugh at your jokes. We always got along fine."

He did not look at Hertha as he said this, but he hoped that she received it in the spirit of good-will in which it was given. He was friends to-night with all the world.

They lingered long over the meal, and when at length they rose, Dick declaring that he could eat no more, the long twilight was almost over.

"Shall we sit on the stoop?" he asked, and Hertha nodded assent. Mrs. Pickens went out with them, and for a few minutes the three remained together, watching the people who came and went on the broad sidewalk, saying little, feeling much. Then Hertha rose and Dick with her.

"I'm going to say good-night to Bob," she explained to the young man, "and then don't you want to come down and we can take a walk?"

It was the first time, in all their acquaintance, that she had taken the initiative in anything they did together, and Dick's happiness was so great he could only awkwardly nod in assent as she moved away.

"I've been seeing 'em," he said as he watched the bright spot her white dress made down the street, "girls and girls; and there isn't one that could sit in the same room with her without looking like two cents! Why, they aren't in the same class. They aren't on the earth with her, they're just things fluttering round!"

He stopped and waved his hands at the utter futility of language as a means of expressing his admiration. "And she's as good——"

"Dick," Mrs. Pickens interrupted, "don't count on her too much."

She was becoming excited now that they were alone together, and wanted to tell the story that, for the past twenty-four hours, she had been turning over in her mind, aghast at its sordidness, yet fascinated by its extraordinary novelty. The words were on her lips that should reveal Hertha's birth, but her instinct as a story-teller held her back. It was too wonderful a tale to be spoiled by a hasty recital. Later, this evening perhaps, she would retail it with proper deliberation. But her few words had roused Dick's jealousy.

"Why can't I count on her?" he asked sharply. "Has any one been around?"

"No, it isn't that. I've something important to tell——"

"Then I'm going to count on her," interrupting savagely. "I won't stop counting on her till she's my wife or some other man's—and if that happens he'd better not come near me! But, shucks, what's the good of talking! What's she looking so tired about? She mustn't work so hard. Why don't you stop her?"

"She's been speaking, Dick, of taking a place this summer as nursery governess. It would give her a chance to go into the country."

"What!" The young man's voice was excited and angry. His good manners forsook him and he spoke to his landlady as though she were a servant. "Don't you let her do that, do you hear? She needs a vacation and I won't have her going away."

"Really," Mrs. Pickens answered with asperity, "you speak as though I had authority over her. I'm not her mother—far from it!"

"Oh, damn!" and he turned to move away.

His utter ignorance coupled with his rudeness, made his companion, despite her well-laid plan, cry out, "I've something for you to see; it was in one of my newspapers. It concerns you and you ought to know. It's about——"

"Put the old thing in my room," he called back as he walked down the street.

Watching his fast disappearing figure, Mrs. Pickens decided that was just what she would do. He should read the tale for himself, and she would then have the privilege of giving him advice and comforting sympathy. She would put the paper where it would greet him when he returned. She went within, very much excited, and upon his cluttered bureau, with his traveling case tumbling its contents over the fresh linen cover, she laid the important sheet. That it might at once convey the desired news she marked the paragraph with a pencil lying at hand. "Will he mind so very much?" she asked herself. "It's all in the past." And then, expectant, hoping that in the end all would come out right with the young people, she left the room.

Dick, for his part, as he walked off forgot his landlady in his dismay at the thought that Hertha might go away. He had made so many plans for those vacation days! He was hot with disappointment when a stumbling step made him glance down to be soothed by the sight of his white flannels. The remembrance of Hertha's half promise to play tennis made him believe that no governess' place was yet secured, and he resolved to buy a net the next morning that they might that afternoon start in to play. They would play Sunday, too, if she desired. The devil might get him for a Sabbath breaker for all he cared! The grim imagery of his religious teaching came to him and he pictured Hertha and himself, tennis rackets in hand, dragged down to the fiery pit. Then he smiled whimsically. His Georgia home with all its crudities, its rough, unpainted houses, its poorly tilled fields, its ignorant, frenzied religion was immeasurably far away. Turning to the present and its shining hope he followed his lode-star down the street.

---

CHAPTER XXXIII

It was the first hot evening of summer. Families were sitting on door-steps and verandas breathing in the night air as it came up from the city's baking streets, hoping for a refreshing ocean breeze. But no breeze came, the leaves on the trees hung motionless, and the smoke from the chimneys moved in a straight line upward. Dick found Hertha alone on the stoop with Bob, and man and boy exchanged pleasantries, the latter exhibiting much pride at his ability to make jokes. To Dick's surprise Hertha was the first to make a movement to go. Kissing the child good-night, and laying her hand for a second on Dick's arm, she walked with him along the street. Bob, though disconsolate, made no attempt to follow them, knowing that with growing darkness it was wisest for him to be inconspicuous, a small figure in the shadow whom parents might forget and fail to send early to bed.

The two figures whom his eyes followed did not go back toward their home but crossed the avenue at the entrance to the park. They walked very slowly, stopping as they reached the first group of trees. He wondered what they were saying. Perhaps Miss Ogilvie was telling Dick one of her stories.

What she was saying was this: "I've something to tell you about myself but I don't know how to begin."

Dick's heart leaped at this sign of confidence. "Begin anywhere it's easiest," he said, "and don't begin at all unless you want to."

"I do want to. At least I think you ought to know. It isn't fair to you not to tell."

"Fire away then," Dick cried cheerfully. "I hope it means that there's something for me to do. Isn't there a cruel father who needs to be hunted in his lair, or an unforgiving sister who is as ugly as you are beautiful whom I can melt with my pleadings? Don't have a fortune anywhere for I want to do everything for you myself."

"No," Hertha said, making a vain attempt to laugh, "there isn't anything like that."

"Whatever there is," Dick's voice trembled in his earnestness, "it can't make any difference to me. I couldn't love you any more, and there isn't any possible thing that could make me love you less."

His shaking voice and the intensity of his speech made Hertha unconsciously draw away. Always hurt by his passion, she stopped for a moment wondering if she were not making a mistake, if she should not leave before it was too late with everything unsaid. But as she looked down the long street the loneliness of a life by herself made her keep her resolve. Holding herself tense she walked quietly by the man's side.

They were under the arc-light that flooded the entrance to the park. Large trees rose about them, their branches meeting overhead. To the right and left small paths wound among the shrubbery to disappear in the darkness. The air was sweet with the fragrance of syringa and honeysuckle and of the fresh, warm earth.

"Shall we walk a little way?" Dick said. "It's jolly hot, isn't it?" fumbling at his stiff collar. "Girls have the bulge on a man this weather when it comes to clothes."

Hertha had intended going to the lake, but the way looked so lonely, so apart from the city lights and sounds, that she shrank from taking one of the paths. "Don't you want to smoke?" she asked. "I'd like to talk with you when you're enjoying your cigar."

The young man laughed and started to comply with her request, but for the first time that evening a breeze sprang up and extinguished his match. With an exclamation of annoyance he moved out of the light into the shrubbery searching in his pocket for a second match. Hertha still stood in the broad light of the road.

Meanwhile, from his vantage ground at home, trying to guess at their possible talk, Bob kept watch, deciding in his mind that what they said was probably not worth much as Miss Ogilvie kept her best stories for him. He had learned from Dick that she had never once told that young man of Tom-of-the-Woods. As he sat meditating he noticed a boy hurry up the street from the car-line below, who, as he came under the near light, proved to be none other than Tom-of-the-Woods himself. With a jump of pleasure, forgetting that he was in hiding, Bob left his perch and ran out with a greeting.

"Hello, Tom!" he called.

Tom looked at the little boy for a moment in perplexity, and then without answering started to walk past.

"Want to see her?" Bob asked cheerfully.

Tom stopped. "Yes," he answered.

"I can tell you where she is," Bob went on cautiously. "What'll you give me if I let you know?"

"I'm in a hurry," Tom said. "Don't fool."

"Gimme your top?"

Tom thrust his hand in his pocket and brought the top out. Grabbing it with one hand, Bob pointed with the other. "See her over there?" He indicated the white figure across the street. "That's her. Say," he called after Tom as he dashed away, "will it vanish for me?"

"Bob, come to bed," came a man's voice from within the house, and, accepting the inevitable, Bob went within.

Tom had hurried across the street. He was the bearer of bad news and had no thought for anything but the white figure ahead to whom he must bring sorrow. Running to where Hertha stood in the bright light he touched her on the arm saying gently, "Sister!"

The girl started back with a cry. The sight of her brother, here in the night, unnerved her. Was he God's messenger, come out of the shadow of the past, to stop her in the path she was about to take? The thought rushed through her mind as she gave her startled cry.

Then behind her came a sound like the bellowing of some wild creature, and Dick flung himself upon the Negro. With a blow he struck the lad to the earth, and holding him fast beat him fiercely.

"Let him alone," Hertha cried, pulling with all her might at Dick's arm. "He did me no harm!"

The man never heard her. His eyes bulging, his breath coming quick, he pounded the prostrate boy with a fury that made Hertha cry out in horror.

"What's up?" A group of men came running in from the street. "What you got?" one demanded. "A nigger? Gimme a turn at him."

Moving a moment from where he bent over Tom to turn to his questioners, Dick gave the lad a chance to wriggle from his grasp. In an instant the black boy was on his feet and running from his enemy into the darkness of the park.

"Catch him," Dick cried, leaping up and calling on the others. "Lynch the nigger!"

The men, there were a dozen by this time, scattered among the trees, Dick leading in the pursuit. Some ran from curiosity, interested to learn the turn events would take; others were bent on executing vengeance. None of them listened to Hertha who in her sweet, light voice was reiterating that the boy had done her no harm.

It was very dark away from the lamp and Tom, who had dashed down one of the paths, turned among the trees and slipped along close to the bushes. He knew nothing of his way but he hoped in the obscurity to elude his pursuers until, weary with their search, they should turn back. He cursed himself for having brought trouble upon Hertha. "If I can jest hide for a space," he thought, "I reckon they'll all go away, and she won't be bothered no more." And crouching under a great bush filled with snow-white blossoms he waited for the men to pass.

It would have turned out as he desired had not his first pursuer been a man from Georgia to whom a hunt for a Negro's skin was as justifiable as a hunt for the skin of a rabbit. And Dick's fury was at its height, for he had seen Tom touch Hertha's arm. He bent to the ground, deaf to everything but his work, and slipped among the bushes until he found Tom crouching close. Then with a great cry he sprang on the boy again.

His grasp slipped and Tom was up and on once more, but this time men closed in about him to the right and left while Dick bellowed behind. Running on ahead as fast as his strength would carry him his foot slipped, and he fell headlong on the path close to the lake. Before he could rise Dick was striking him cruelly in the face.

"Come on, boys," he cried, "somebody get a rope. We'll string this damned buck on the nearest tree!"

"Let him alone," came Hertha's voice as she ran toward them through the trees. "Let him alone."

Her call only infuriated her lover. Turning upon the black boy he kicked him with his boot; and as though he could not wait for the rope for which he had called, encircled his neck with his hands as though to strangle him.

Then Tom uttered a cry. It was the first sound he had made, a broken sob, uttered unconsciously as the hands closed about his throat.

To Hertha it was the cry of the baby who had been hers to tend and keep. She saw him running to her along the alley in their old home, his lip bleeding where a white boy had thrown a stone. She held her arms out to succor him, and, a child herself, caught him to her heart and wiped away his tears. Stretching her arms out again she prayed that she might help him now. And suddenly, like a bolt from heaven, the word came to her that should bring his release. She cried it at once, loudly, shrilly. "He's my brother," she called. "He's my brother, he's a right to speak to me!" And then, on the still hot air, "I'm colored, I'm colored!"

Dick's hands relaxed and fell to his sides. The men moved away, one of them saying with a laugh, "Beg pardon, lady, the joke's on us." Tom, unconscious, lay close to the lake on the pathway.

Out from among the trees, like a spirit in her white dress, Hertha moved straight to Tom. Sitting beside his inert body she lifted his head upon her lap. There was no light near, and she peered anxiously into his dark face. Her hand, moving over his forehead, found a gash, and with her handkerchief she wiped away the blood. He was so very still, his head hung so lifelessly, that in fear she sought his temple and to her infinite relief found the pulse throbbing. Caressingly she smoothed his soft, velvet cheek.

"Want this?"

It was one of the men who brought her water from the lake in a paper cup. She thanked him and wetting her handkerchief continued to wipe the ugly wound. The man turned and went on his way.

Across the path, a long, thin, shadow-like figure, stood Dick. He had not spoken or moved since Hertha had lifted the black boy's head upon her white dress. He was so still she might have heard his breathing had her thoughts been anywhere but with her charge. Now, when they were left alone, he spoke.

"So that was your secret, my fine lady!" His bitter sneer hissed itself into the night. "You're a grand lady, you are, and I'm only a Georgia cracker!"

Stepping forward he bent down and tried to peer into her face. It was so dark he could see little, only that she was watching for a movement of life from the form whose head lay on her lap.

"Damn you," he cried furiously, his passion triumphing over his sneer. "You damned white-faced nigger, I'll teach you to lie to a white man. You hear me? You've had your play with me, and by Christ, I'll have mine now."

She was as silent, as motionless as the senseless figure of the boy whom he had felled. The very stillness startled him and fumblingly he struck a match.

A circle of light surrounded her and he saw that they were close to the lake where she so often walked with Bob. The light glowed on the clear, white bark of the birch tree. It fell, too, on her face. Her head was raised now and she looked at him, her eyes and mouth infinitely sad. With a little gesture of her hand in dismissal, she said softly, "Go away, please." And then forgetting him in her anxiety, she dropped her eyes upon the wounded boy.

The match went out. All Dick could see was the bowed figure, the head bent low as a mother bends to look at her infant. He strained his burning eyes, striving in the darkness again to see the white face, the curling hair. Then with a cry of pain as pitiful as that Tom had uttered he turned and ran, stumbling on the roots hid in the grass, tearing his clothes upon the bushes, ran blindly amid the dark, overhanging trees until he found himself in the light of the city streets.

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CHAPTER XXXIV

Kathleen was standing by her kitchen-stove looking with disgust at the eggs and milk that she had been trying to persuade to become a custard but that had resolved themselves into whey. The heat had been so great she had delayed her cooking until a late hour, and now it was past time to go to bed. With a gesture of resigned despair she walked across the room and threw the mixture into the sink.

"It's a drear world," she remarked grimly.

Going to her window she looked out into the night. There were lights still in a number of the flats. She could discern children sleeping on the fire escapes, and among the sounds that rose to where she stood was a man's harsh, drunken voice and a woman's higher, scolding tones. "'Tis a night when eyes will be blackened," she said to herself, "more than kitchen-stoves. Let's pray the grown-ups have it to themselves and don't waken the kids."

In the midst of her reflections the bell rang. With another sigh of resignation she punched the button that released the lower latch, and going into the hall threw open her door to greet her evening visitor.

Some one was coming up the stairs quickly, excitedly. She could hear short, swift footsteps on the treads, running through the hall to hurry up the stairs again. Some urgent call she presumed—a baby fighting for entrance into this world, or a sick child weeping to leave it. Instinctively drawing herself up for service, Kathleen stood ready to answer whatever call might come. The hurrying steps faltered a little at the third flight as though halted by overpowering weariness, but in a second they came on fast again. She could see the figure now—a girl, hatless, coatless, in a white dress. A moment, and she was looking into Hertha's upturned face.

"Let me in, Kathleen," the girl cried.

The Irishwoman's greeting was instant and affectionate. Any harbored resentment vanished as she saw that her visitor was in trouble, needing her help. Had Hertha come richly dressed, breathing prosperity, she would have received scant welcome; but now she was led into the kitchen, her hostess talking affectionately.

"It was this very evening, dearie, I was thinking of you when the custard went back on me. If my old lodger was here now, I says to myself, we'd be eating custards as smooth as Father McGinnis when he comes asking for ten dollars for the church. Sit down in your old seat, it's missing you."

But Hertha did not sit. She had heard nothing of Kathleen's welcome. Standing by the table, her head thrown back defiantly, she cried in an excited voice, "Keep me here to-night and I'll be out of your way to-morrow."

"It's for you to stay as long as you like," her friend answered.

She was shocked at the girl's appearance. During their months of separation she had often thought of her as she had moved about the kitchen, calling up the pleasant picture of a daintily dressed young woman, quiet in her movements, smiling upon her as she put the last touch to the table before their meal. She had never seen her untidy or seriously perturbed. But this figure before her was a distorted image of its former self. The hair was rough and loose, the dress had dark stains, the hands were soiled. And in the white, thin face were both anger and fear. "Don't touch me," she said, as Kathleen went toward her. "Listen to what I'm saying. I am going South to-morrow, with my brother. You know I said I had a brother. He is hurt, in the hospital, but they'll let him go with me to-morrow."

"Then he's not badly hurt," Kathleen said soothingly, "if they'll let him go so soon."

"He is badly hurt," Hertha cried, her voice sharp and hoarse. "But he's going with me to-morrow. We must go. My mother is dying."

A vivid remembrance of Hertha's avowal that her mother had been dead for many years flashed through Kathleen's mind.

"Yes, my mother," Hertha said, noting the look of bewilderment. "My mother, my own mother. Don't you touch me," her voice rose to a scream and she pushed her friend back as she approached her. "You don't want to know me, you don't want to be near me. I'm colored!"

With a sob Kathleen drew the girl close in her arms. The body she clasped was tense as steel, but regardless of resistance she held the slender form close, kissed the cold cheek, touched with her lips the soft hair and little ear. With her strong, capable hand she caressed the girl's small head and kept repeating, "My darling, as though that mattered!" and "Why should you be thinking anything of that!" and "As if that mattered, mavourneen!"

Hertha, still tense, lifted her face. "Don't try to comfort me," she said. "I don't ask for any one's pity. You mustn't say what you don't mean."

"What do you take me for?" Affectionate indignation was in Kathleen's speech. "What sort of devil would I be if I cared for a thing like that! Now don't fret any more, darling, but sit down while I make you a cup of tea."

Hertha did not move from where she stood, but gripped her friend, a hand on either shoulder, looking into her face. And as Kathleen looked back she felt as if the gleaming eyes, utterly sorrowful, were searching her very soul. Cursing herself for her former selfishness, she prayed that her heart might be read aright that the love which overflowed it for this friend whose hidden sorrow she had never understood, might shine now in her face. She said nothing, understanding that Hertha sought for an avowal deeper than words.

Evidently she found it. Dropping her hands she sat down in the chair which Kathleen had placed for her. "I believe you," she said solemnly. "And now I'll tell you the whole truth. I'm not colored, I'm white."

Through the hour that passed in the hot little kitchen Hertha told her story, Kathleen experiencing every emotion from incredulity to overmastering indignation. During the recital the narrator herself was strangely aloof, speaking as though she were an onlooker anxious to retail correctly each point but indifferent to the effect she was producing. She sought neither advice nor comfort. Her hard, steady tone, never varying in pitch or intensity, gave the impression of one with whom something was completed, finished beyond possibility of change. At the last, when her listener carried out of herself with anger at the attack upon Tom indulged in fierce invective, she relaxed a little, and spoke more naturally as she described her strategy and its success. But to Kathleen's words of admiration, to her condemnation of her lover, she paid no heed.

"Tom came to tell me Mammy was ill," she ended. "She was ill this winter but they didn't know what it was. Now she has had another stroke and may not live until we get there. Tom and I must go to-morrow, even though he is so weak. He's her only son."

"How will you go?" Kathleen asked.

"You'll lend me something to wear, won't you? I shan't need much."

"Of course," was the swift answer. "I wasn't thinking of that."

"You mean how shall I travel? I shall travel in the jim crow coach with Tom. He's my brother, you know, I'm colored."

She spoke in a hard, emotionless voice. Perplexed, Kathleen smiled up at her.

"Oh, I mean it," the southern girl said, straightening in her chair. "I'm going home. I shall never be white again."

"Dearie," the Irishwoman replied, "you talk as if color were a state of mind."

"Isn't it?" Hertha asked.

Rising from her seat she went to the sink and turning on the faucet got a drink for herself. As she put down the glass she looked at her hands. "This is Tom's blood," she said, washing them under the running water. "White people are so brave! They never strike any one weaker than they! Why, Kathleen, he's just a little boy. It isn't long since he was in short trousers. I know, I made them for him."

She wiped her hands clean and stood looking beyond Kathleen into the world of men and women. Speech, usually so difficult, came to her in gusts of words, thoughts that clamored for expression, the pent-up thoughts that for many years had been pressing against her heart.

"White people are wicked. Not you, Kathleen, you are good and that's why people laugh at you and scorn you. They hate goodness. It is the way that old man said at the restaurant. People, white people, are cruel. They care only for themselves. What did they do for me in this world? They threw me out to die. I wasn't worth an hour's care. And the men, men who've said they loved me! Loved! They saw color in my face and they played with me or despised me. And they say they're so good!" The bitterness in her voice was pitiable. "They're always saying they're so good. They write about it and preach about it. We black people, we are bad. We are immoral and common and cheap. Well, I want to be with bad people. I've been with good people as long as I can bear. I want to be with bad people again."

"Don't go on so, dearie," Kathleen said, anguish in her voice. "Rest and see what to-morrow will bring. You'll kill yourself if you go on like this."

"Good!" Hertha cried again with infinite scorn. Then as though a sudden thought came to her, her whole manner softened. "I'll tell you who is good,—my mammy. She took me in. She didn't question whether I'd grow up pretty and clever, or ugly and dull. She took me in her arms. She's like that. She isn't thinking about herself, she's thinking about others. She don't care if they're black or white. I know, oh, I know. And if she dies before I get home I'm going to die too!"

Suddenly her strength gave way, her indignation, her angry pride. "And I was trying to be white," she moaned, "I was trying to be ashamed of her." She flung herself into her friend's arms, the tears streaming down her cheeks. "I was trying to forget."

Then Kathleen came into her own. Soothingly, caressingly, she got Hertha out of her white dress with its bloodstains into a loose one of her own. She brought water and a towel and washed her face. She brushed back her tangled hair. And all the time she talked, sympathetically yet cheerfully, with rare tact turning the girl's attention from her own sorrow. Hope emanated from her kind face, from her running speech; until at length Hertha found herself sitting in a chair sipping a cup of tea, and smiling a little uncertainly at some odd remark.

"It's so good to be here," she said, looking with deep gratitude into Kathleen's face. "When I had to leave Tom, I hurried to you. I knew if you were home you'd take me in, but I was afraid you'd be caring for some one else. I was frightened to ring the bell."

Her friend smiled benignantly.

"It's just the same as ever, only prettier. You've been doing a lot of housecleaning."

There was a smart look about the place. The chairs had a fresh coat of paint, the oilcloth on the table was white and new, and every bit of metal was polished, from the knob on the oven door to the faucets at the sink. The agate tea-kettle was gone, its place taken by one of shining aluminum. At the windows the flowers blossomed with lovely profusion, geraniums sharing the boxes with trailing green vines and marguerites. Even the floor had shared in the general sprucing up and shone with paint and varnish.

Taking in the many changes about her, commenting on this and that, Hertha suddenly rose and going to a shelf above the stove, took down a pipe. She turned it in her hand and said with a trembling little smile, that would have been mischievous if it had had the strength, "I wouldn't have thought it of you, and you so young. Wait till you're an old woman."

Kathleen was too happy in her friend's returning brightness to be able to retort. She could only answer, looking very foolish: "You've taken a glance about the room and can see for yourself what's happened. I was that lonely after you went away I hadn't the will to deny him. He came in one day with the license in his pocket, and nothing for it but we must go to the mayor to be tied together. So I put on my hat and went with him."

"I am so glad!" Hertha's eyes shone with unselfish pleasure. "I liked him very much. But where is he?"

"In your old room, darling, sleeping as quiet as a baby. He goes to bed each night at half-past ten and at eleven he's breathing as regular as if there was never a care in the world. He wanted me to live in his place, but when I caught a sight of his landlady's face I brought him here. It would have been strychnine in my tea if she had had the chance, she was that fond of him."

"I don't wonder a bit."

Kathleen's kimona trailing behind her on the polished floor, Hertha walked about the room, examining each newly acquired article. "How pretty and shipshape everything looks!"

"Wait till you see the parlor with the piano!" Kathleen's raillery could not conceal her pride. "We have music every night from half-past eight to half-past nine precisely. It's his daily practising. But we go by the clock these days!"

"You like it," Hertha declared, "I know you do," and she received no denial.

Tucked in bed in the room that was once Kathleen's, her hair lying, a braid on either side of her face, she looked younger and more childlike than when she had lived here, months before. But only for a minute. Away from the brightness of the kitchen the harassed, frightened look returned. Her sorrow rushed back and clutching her friend's hand she held her to her side.

"I must be up early, Kathleen, to go to the hospital. Will you lend me a hat?"

"That I will."

"And an old coat? I'll send it back to you."

"Anything I have."

"Oh, Kathleen, do you think I'll get there in time? Shall I be too late?"

"There's the best of chances. Old folks have more strength than we give them credit for. Probably she'll be better again."

Hertha still clutched her friend's hand. "Do you remember the old Major, Kathleen, when he told me to keep out of the conflict?"

"Indeed I do. Wasn't he cross that evening!"

"I tried to follow his advice. I wanted not to fight, just to let things go the easiest way, but I couldn't."

Her friend, looking at her, thinking of the past and of the days to come, of the loneliness of a life among the whites and the tragic circumscription of a life among the colored, could find no comforting answer. She was face to face with a harder problem than any she had tried to solve. The machine, sucking the vitality of the child; the long day of toiling men and women; fierce, relentless competition; there were tools with which to battle against these; she had used them and in the end she and her comrades would conquer with them. But where were the tools with which to fight the base cruelty, the cheap conceit that left a boy on a hospital bed to-night bruised in body and spirit, and sent this gentle girl to her half-crazed with grief and pain? In the church? The persecutors of the black man were the pillars of the church. In the state? When the Negro was beaten or shot or lynched the state winked slyly at the white offender. In the working class? They were brothers of the blacks when they were hungry. An advantage won and they, too, persecuted the weak. Where then were the tools? Where, unless with the black men and women themselves; but if they took them up how unequal must be the battle!

"I couldn't keep out of it," Hertha said again, a quizzical look coming for a moment to her face. "I wouldn't picket, you remember, but that wasn't my conflict. It wasn't mine until it came to Tom."

Kathleen kissed her. "You'll get a little sleep now."

"I'll try, but I don't mind lying awake with you and Billy near."

She said the name shyly, looking with questioning glance as if to ask whether her welcome would be a cordial one when her friend's husband knew her story.

"He'll be glad to see you! He's been blaming me in his heart for staying away from you, though he'd never say a word of blame aloud. His welcome is right here. And you'll admire the flowers. I don't half appreciate them. Indeed, I've reason to be jealous of you, that I have."

"You are so good, Kathleen!"

It was two o'clock when Kathleen closed the bedroom door, leaving her charge at length asleep. But she did not herself seek rest. Filling the washtub, she plunged Hertha's white dress in the water and worked furiously to obliterate the dark stains. When it was cleansed and pressed, the torn places mended with her irregular stitches, the first light of day had entered the windows and the flowers were turning to the light. Tired, but with no desire to sleep, she set the table for breakfast and then at last went into her room. There on the bed lay her husband, resting quietly, utterly oblivious of all that had happened beyond his bedroom wall. As she looked upon him a beautiful smile came over her face. It was well, she thought, that some could sleep while the eternal battle waged. Without them the world would be bare, ugly, bereft of the fragrance of the flowers. Taking off her dress she lay down for a few minutes beside him, not sleeping, thinking of plans for the day before them, vigilant at her post in the darkness and in the light.

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IV