in the patch of a garden for the
wherewithal to keep the poor roof over her head. She hoed and dug and
drove hard bargains with the grocers to whom she sold her meagre
products. She washed and ironed and mended and darned and cooked,
coming at length perforce to the drudgery which throughout her brief
life in the hole in the ground she had scornfully disdained.

Not once did the thought of asking help of Seth or of returning to him
present itself.

And yet there were tardy times when the memory of the winds remained
with her day in and day out, when at twilight she sat on the steps of
her vine-covered, crumbling portico and communed with herself.

When, placing herself apart, she reviewed her life and observed
herself with the critical eye of an uninterested outsider.

Invariably then she would say to herself, remembering the wail and
shriek and moan of the hideous winds:

"I would leave them again, the winds and the child and him. If it
happened a second time, and I again had the choice, I would leave
them exactly the same."

Then aloud, in apology for what had the look to her own biased eyes of
utter heartlessness:

"It was the fault of the winds," she would mutter, "it was the fault
of the winds!"

CHAPTER XXIII.

[Illustration]

Kentucky! God's country!

It was as if Seth had dropped out of a wind-blown cloud into a quiet
garden, sweetly fenced about and away from the jar and fret of the
world.

Placid, content, tranquil, standing stock-still in the delicacy of its
old-fashioned beauty, as if the world outside and beyond had never
progressed.

He wandered by old and rich plantations, carved by necessity into
smaller farms, past big white stone gates opening to wide avenues
which led up to them, looking wistfully in, still content to wander a
space before he should experience the rapture of seeing Celia's face,
loitering, the white happiness of that within his reach, half fearing
to hold out his hand for it, fearing it might vanish, escape
phantasmagorically, turn out to be a will-o'-the-wisp.

Whip-poor-wills accompanied him in his wanderings, Bob Whites,
Nightingales; and lazy ebon negroes, musical as birds, sang lilting
Southern songs on the way to the tinkle of banjo and guitar.

The negroes were not so kind as the birds. From them he suffered
humiliation.

More than once he was dubbed "Po' white!" by some haughty ebon
creature from whose mouth he was supposedly taking the bread.