"Well, well...."
"I was positive the administrator hadn't granted you an extension, nor wouldn't have, so it must have been some one near. So who else could it have been but Jean Baptiste."
"Of course not, now that I recall it; but did you tell him about it?"
Her eyes had business in her lap at the moment, very much business. She saw the sewing and she didn't see it. What she was seeing again was what had happened one day when she had gone to carry his and her brother's luncheon.... It passed before her, as it had done many times since. Never, she knew, would she be able to forget that day, that day when the harvest was on, and he had said sweet words to her.... It was all past now, forever, but it was as fresh as the day it was done.
She understood why he had gone away, and when he returned and she had seen his face she understood then his sacrifice. She knew that the man's honor, his respect for his race and their struggle had brought him to commit the sacrifice. And strangely, she loved him the more for it. It had been an evidence of his great courage, the great strength with which he was possessed. It was strange that the only man she, a white girl, had ever loved was a Negro, and now when that was history, it seemed to relieve her when she could recall that he had been a man.
"Did you hear me, Aggie?" her father called now again. She started.
"Why—yes, father—I heard you," she said, straightening up. "And—of course—I told him about it...."
"Now I'm glad to hear that you did. It seems that you ought to have told me at the time—at least before we left there, so that I could have thanked him." He was silent for a time then and reflective.
"I wonder what sort of woman he married," he mused after a time.
"I don't know."