ants. "Dar was two front rooms on de next flo' dat dey never
used," explained Aunt Chloe; "friends allowed dat dey could let 'em to
white folks, but dey had always been done kep' for Marse Hamlin, ef he
ever wanted to be wid his old niggers again." Jack looked up quickly
with a brightened face, made a sign to Hannibal, and the two left the
room together.

When he came through the passage a few moments later, there was a sound
of laughter in the parlor. He recognized the full, round lazy chuckle of
Aunt Chloe, but there was a higher girlish ripple that he did not know.
He had never heard Sophy laugh before. Nor, when he entered, had he
ever seen her so animated. She was helping Chloe set the table, to that
lady's intense delight at "Missy's" girlish housewifery. She was picking
the berries fresh from the garden, buttering the Sally Lunn, making the
tea, and arranging the details of the repast with apparently no trace
of her former discontent and unhappiness in either face or manner. He
dropped quietly into a chair by the window, and, with the homely scents
of the garden mixing with the honest odors of Aunt Chloe's cookery,
watched her with an amusement that was as pleasant and grateful as it
was strange and unprecedented.

"Now den," said Aunt Chloe to her husband, as she put the finishing
touch to the repast in a plate of doughnuts as exquisitely brown and
shining as Jack's eyes were at that moment, "Hannibal, you just come
away, and let dem two white quality chillens have dey tea. Dey's done
starved, shuah." And with an approving nod to Jack, she bundled her
husband from the room.

The door closed; the young girl began to pour out the tea, but Jack
remained in his seat by the window. It was a singular sensation which
he did not care to disturb. It was no new thing for Mr. Hamlin to find
himself at a tete-a-tete repast with the admiring and complaisant fair;
there was a 'cabinet particulier' in a certain San Francisco restaurant
which had listened to their various vanities and professions of undying
faith; he might have recalled certain festal rendezvous with a widow
whose piety and impeccable reputation made it a moral duty for her to
come to him only in disguise; it was but a few days ago that he had
been let privately into the palatial mansion of a high official for a
midnight supper with a foolish wife. It was not strange, therefore, that
he should be alone here, secretly, with a member of that indiscreet,
loving