the brief remarks
heard by the loungers outside. After this the stranger rode away and Tom
lounged back to his chair. He made no reply to Stamps's explanatory
aside, and no comment upon the remarks of the company whose curiosity had
naturally received a new impetus which spurred them on to gossip a little
in the usual vague manner. He gave himself up to speculation. The mere
tone of a man's voice had set his mind to work. His past life had given
him experience in which those about him were lacking, and at the instant
he heard the stranger speak this experience revealed to him as by a flash
of light, a thing which had never yet been even remotely guessed at.

"A gentleman, by thunder!" he said to himself. "That's it! A gentleman!"

He knew he could not be mistaken. Low and purposely muffled as the voice
had been, he recognised in it that which marked it as the voice of a man
trained to modulated speech. And even this was not all, though it had led
him to look again, and more closely, at the face shadowed by the broad
hat. It was not a handsome face, but it was one not likely to be readily
forgotten. It was worn and haggard, the features strongly aquiline, the
eyes somewhat sunken; it was the face of a man who had lived the life of
an ascetic and who, with a capacity for sharp suffering, had suffered and
was suffering still.

"But a gentleman and not a Southerner," Tom persisted to himself. "A
Yankee, as I'm a sinner; and what is a Yankee doing hiding himself here
for?"

It was such a startling thing under the circumstances, that he could not
rid himself of the thought of it. It haunted him through the rest of the
day, and when night came and the store being closed, he retired as usual
to the back part of the house, he was brooding over it still.

He lived in a simple and primitive style. Three rooms built on to the
store were quite enough for him. One was his sitting- and bedroom,
another his dining-room and kitchen, the third the private apartment of
his household goddess, a stout old mulatto woman who kept his house in
order and prepared his meals.

When he opened the door to-night the little boarded rooms were
illuminated with two tallow candles and made fragrant with the odour of
fried chicken and hoe-cakes, to which Aunt Mornin was devoting all her
energies, and for the first time perhaps in his life, he failed to greet
these attractions with his usual air of good cheer.

He threw his hat into a chair, and,