avery would have been the greatest god-send to blacks. It was
what stays are to women. But they didn't. The low down white made slavery
impossible with his whipping and oppression and _we_ had to suffer. Well,
we haven't ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying like
rabbits there's no knowing what we've got to suffer yet."

Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. "Now, that girl," said the
elder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, "is just the type of the people I
was telling her about. No idea but whipping. _She_ wouldn't have much
mercy on a human creature black or tan _or_ white. Thick skinned. She
didn't even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what brought
her here this hour with her _creche_. It's just a fad. If they got up a
charity to make alligator bait of the black babies so's to sell the
alligator skins to buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it'd be
all the same to her. Something to gad about with. I wish I'd kept that ten
dollars in my pocket."

Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night--before ten--and Phyl, who was
free to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching the
moon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a plan
that had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckney
for bed.

She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dial
becoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mystery
which is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn.

Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of the
northern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at times
and in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one is
walking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed lit
by a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would never
lose the charm of dawn.

Yet the garden to which she would now turn her eyes shewed nothing of
this. Night reigned there from the cherokee roses moving in the wind to
the carnations motionless, moon stricken, deathly white.

Sure that Miss Pinckney would not come down again, Phyl rose and crossed
the garden towards the gate.

She wanted to see if the trysting place behind the magnolia and the bushes
that grew about it were still there.

At the gate she paused for a moment, glancing back at the house as Juliet
Mascarene might have done on those even