"You haven't told me why you are sorry," said Nan, when the lad's silence had become embarrassing to her.
"Well, I am just sorry," Gabriel replied.
"You are angry," she declared.
"No," he insisted, "I am just sorry. I don't know why, unless it's because you are not the same. You have been changing all the time, I reckon, but I never noticed it so much until to-day." His tone was one of complaint.
As Nan stood there regarding Gabriel with an expression of perplexity in her countenance, and tapping the ground impatiently with one foot, the two young people got their first whiff of the troubles that had been slowly gathering over that region. Around the corner near which they stood, two men had paused to finish an earnest conversation. Evidently they had been walking along, but their talk had become so interesting, apparently, that they paused involuntarily. They were hid from Nan and Gabriel by the high brick wall that enclosed Madame Awtry's back yard.
"As president of this league," said a voice which neither Nan nor Gabriel could recognise, "you will have great responsibility. I hope you realise it."
"I'm in hopes I does, suh," replied the other, whose voice there was no difficulty in recognising as that of the Rev. Jeremiah Tomlin.
"As you so aptly put it last night at your church, the bottom rail is now on top, and it will stay there if the coloured people know their own interests. Every dollar that has been made in the South during the parst two hundred years was made by the niggeroes and belongs to them."
"Dat is so, suh; dat is de Lord's trufe. I realise dat, suh; an' I'll try fer ter make my people reelize it," responded the Rev. Jeremiah.
"What you lack in experience," continued the first speaker, "you make up in numbers. It is important to remember that. Organise your race, get them together, impress upon them the necessity of acting as one man. Once organised, you will find leaders. All the arrangements have been made for that."