“Getting their Sunday School lesson—she, Uncle Bisco, and the Bishop.”
Travis frowned and gave a nervous twitch of his shoulders as he turned around to find himself a chair.
“No one knows just how we feel towards Uncle Bisco and his wife,” went on Mrs. Westmore in half apology—“she has been with us so long and is now so old and helpless since they were freed; their children have all left them—gone—no one knows where. And so Uncle Bisco and Aunt Charity are as helpless as babes, and but for Alice they would suffer greatly.”
A sudden impulse seized Travis: “Let us go and peep in on them. We shall have a good joke on Her Majesty.”
Mrs. Westmore laughed, and they slipped quietly out to Uncle Bisco's cabin. Down a shrubbery-lined walk they went—then through the woods across a field. It was a long walk, but the path was firm and good, and the moon lit it up. They came to the little cabin at last, in the edge of another wood. Then they slipped around and peeped in the window.
A small kerosene lamp sat on a table lighting up a room scrupulously clean.
Uncle Bisco was very old. His head was, in truth, a cotton plant full open. His face was intelligent, grave—such a face as Howard Weeden only could draw from memory. He had finished his supper, and from the remnants left on the plate it was plain that Alice Westmore had prepared for the old man dainties which she, herself, could not afford to indulge in.
By him sat his old wife, and on the other side of the fireplace was the old overseer, his head also white, his face strong and thoughtful. He was clean shaven, save a patch of short white chin-whiskers, and his big straight nose had a slight hook of shrewdness in it.
Alice Westmore was reading the chapter—her voice added to it an hundred fold: “Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in God, believe also in me.... In my Father's house are many mansions...!”
The lamplight fell on her hair. It was brown where the light flashed over it, and lay in rippling waves around her temples in a splendid coil down the arch of her neck, and shining in strong contrast through the gauzy dark sheen of her black gown. But where the light fell, there was that suspicion of red which the last faint tendril a dying sunbeam throws out in a parting clutch at the bosom of a cloud.