"Fanky, boss, fanky; tole yo' dat yo' wus a rus'ler, did'n' I? Goo'by, boss, 'cessful journey to yo', sah."
"Good-by, Mono, we'll go a fishing when I come back," Reynolds called after him, as he rapidly retreated.
"All right, boss, I go wid yo'. I show yo' wha' dey is, sho's yo' bo'n. Goo'by!"
The morning breeze was singing in the vines that clothed the heavy columns of the tall veranda, and its gentle current tossed some loose tresses across Mrs. Ransom's happy face. It was time for Reynolds to be on his road, but he faltered whenever he undertook to say the word of parting. Yet a minute or two, he would think: I will make up for the lost time when I get started. She had never appeared so beautiful as now, never so happy, never so loving.
"Walk down to the gate with me," he presently said: "it will give me a happy send-off on my journey, to look back and see you standing there watching me as I am going out of sight among the shadows of the wood."
They spent a long time passing over the space between the veranda and the gate. Here they paused to dally beside a bed of hyacinth or there to note how wonderfully large the violets were. A touch of childishness, or thoughtlessness (or was it that artlessness which comes of complete self-forgetfulness?) made their actions amusingly interesting to Mrs. DeKay, who watched them from the window.
The colored driver was perched upon his high seat in front of the DeKay landau and the team of chestnut mares was ready for the road. There was plenty of time left in which to reach Montgomery so as to take the north bound train.
"Agnes," Reynolds murmured, "you must be ready to set an early day for our marriage by the time of my return. We shall want to sail as early in June as possible. I have not yet spoken to your uncle and aunt, but I shall as soon as I return."
She was silent, but it was a silence just as satisfactory to her lover as any words could have been.
The barbaric imagination, always a part of the negro, must have been aroused in the driver as he lounged in his seat and gazed at the beautiful woman and the tall, strong man straying down the walk. Their figures were boldly relieved against the dull gray background of the old house, and framed in with vines and magnolia boughs. He had a vivid though savagely crude sense of the warmth and tenderness and freshness of the picture. His indolent, half-closed eyes and shining, jet black face were expressive of that dreamy phase of delight which is generated by mere passive receptivity. The delicate blue of Mrs. Ransom's dress, the charming bloom of her face and the supple grace and strength of her slender figure were to him as a star is to a poet, a mystery, a focus of unapproachable glory, never to be any nearer or any further away. He felt, without knowing it, all the æsthetic values of the scene before him; the cloudless, tender sky, the rich green of the magnolias, the wind-beaten and rain-stained old mansion all wrapped in semi-tropical vines, the flare of the sunlight and the soft glooms of the shade, and, beyond the house and the trees, the sheeny reeds and the broad, winding river, all these with the fresh perfumes and delicious spring wind, touched him and