had not talked before, and by small
attentions and kindnesses. She had greeted him in the morning with
smiles, where her face once wore the sad mask of misery; and she had
touched his hand sometimes, with encouraging or commending caress.

Joe had yielded to her immediately the unreserved loyalty of his
unsophisticated soul. The lot of his bondage was lightened by this new
tie, the prospect of the unserved term under Isom was not so forbidding
now. And now this fellow Morgan had stepped between them, in some manner
beyond his power to define. It was as one who beholds a shadow fall
across his threshold, which he can neither pick up nor cast away.

Ollie had no more little attentions for Joe, but endless solicitude for
Morgan's comfort; no more full smiles for him, but only the reflections
of those which beamed for the chattering lounger who made a pretense of
selling books while he made love to another man's wife.

It was this dim groping after the truth, and his half-conception of it,
that rendered Joe miserable. He did not fully understand what Morgan was
about, but it was plain to him that the man had no honest purpose there.
He could not repeat his fears to Isom, for Isom's wrath and correction
would fall on Ollie. Now he was left in charge of his master's house,
his lands, his livestock, and _his honor_.

The vicarious responsibility rested on him with serious weight. Knowing
what he knew, and seeing what he saw, should he allow things to proceed
as they had been going? Would he be true to the trust that Isom had
placed in him with his parting word in standing aside and knowingly
permitting this man to slip in and poison the heart of Isom's wife?

She was lonely and oppressed, and hungry for kind words, but it was not
this stranger's office to make green the barrenness of her life. He was
there, the bondboy, responsible to his master for his acts. She might
come to him for sympathy, and go away with honor. But with this other,
this man whose pale eyes shifted and darted like a botfly around a
horse's ear, could she drink his counsel and remain undefiled?

Joe thought it up and down as he worked in the field near the house that
morning, and his face grew hot and his eyes grew fevered, and his
resentment against Morgan rose in his throat.

He watched to see the man drive away on his canvassing round, but the
sun passed nine o'clock and he did not go. He had no right there, alone
in the house with that woman, pu