s black mask; his eyes took in the high-cut
waistcoat, the unmistakable clerical look. "You were sent?"

"By the board of foreign missions."

"I do not know it. Not by the archbishop?"

"There is no archbishop in my Church."

"In your Church?" Father Antoine's eyes sprang wide--wide as they had
been when he kicked the boatman. "In your Church? You are not of the
true faith, then?"

Pride of race, unchastened because he had not till that moment been
conscious that it existed in him, swelled in Simpson.

"Are you?" he asked.

Father Antoine stared at him, not as an angry white man stares, but
with head thrown back and mouth partly open, in the manner of his
race. Then, with the unreasoned impetuousness of a charging bull, he
turned and flung shoreward down the pier. The cripple, groaning still,
crawled to Simpson's feet and sat there.

"_Pauvre garcon_!" repeated Simpson dully. "_Pauvre garcon_!"

Suddenly the boy stopped groaning, swung Simpson's kit-bag on his
shoulder, and sidled up the pier. His right leg bent outward at the
knee, and his left inward; his head, inclined away from his burden,
seemed curiously detached from his body; his gait was a halting sort
of shuffle; yet he got along with unexpected speed. Simpson, still
dazed, followed him into the Grand Rue--a street of smells and piled
filth, where gorged buzzards, reeking of the tomb, flapped upward
under his nose from the garbage and offal of their feast. Simpson
paused for a moment at the market-stalls, where negroes of all shades
looked out at him in a silence that seemed devoid of curiosity. The
cripple beckoned him and he hurried on. On the steps of the cathedral
he saw Father Antoine, but, although the priest must have seen him, he
gave no sign as he passed. He kept to what shade there was. Presently
his guide turned down a narrow alley, opened a dilapidated picket
gate, and stood waiting.

"_Maman_!" he called. "_Oh! Maman_!"

Simpson, his curiosity faintly stirring, accepted the invitation of
the open gate, and stepped into an untidy yard, where three or four
pigs and a dozen chickens rooted and scratched among the bayonets of
yucca that clustered without regularity on both sides of the path. The
house had some pretensions; there were two stories, and, although the
blue and red paint had mostly flaked away, the boarding looked sound.
In the yard there was less fetor than there had been outside.

"_Maman_!" called the boy again.

A pot-