d a question. "Do it all go to de credito's anyhow, Miss
'Liza, no matteh how much us bring?" and when aunt said yes, Sidney
murmured to her mother, "I tol' you dat." I wondered when she had told
her.

Uncle and aunt tried hard to find one buyer for the four, but failed;
nobody who wanted the other three had any use for Mingo. It was after
nightfall when they came dragging home. "Now don't you fret one bit
'bout dat, Mawse Ben," exclaimed Sidney, with a happy heroism in her
eyes that I remembered afterward. "'De Lawd is perwide!'"

"Strange," said my aunt to uncle and me aside, smiling in pity, "how
slight an impression disaster makes on their minds!" and that too I
remembered afterward.

As soon as we were alone in my chamber, Sidney and I, she asked me to
tell her again of the clock in the sky, and at the end of her service
and of my recital she drew me to my window and showed me how promptly
she could point out the pole-star at the centre of the clock's vast
dial, although at our right a big moon was leaving the tree tops and
flooding the sky with its light. Toward this she turned, and lifting
an arm with the reverence of a priestess said, in impassioned monotone:

"'De moon shine full at His comman'
An' all de stahs obey.'"

She kissed my hand as she added good-by. "Why, Sidney!" I laughed,
"you mean good night, don't you?"

She bent low, tittered softly, and then, with a swift return to her
beautiful straightness, said: "But still, Miss Maud, who eveh know when
dey say good night dat it ain't good-by?" She fondled my hand between
her two as she backed away, kissed it fervently again, and was gone.

When I awoke my aunt stood in broad though sunless daylight at the
bedside, with the waking cup of coffee which it was Sidney's wont to
bring. I started from the pillow. "Oh! what--who--wh'--where's
Sidney? Why--how long has it been raining?"

"It began at break of day," she replied, adding pensively, "thank God."

"Oh! were we in such bad need of rain?"

"_They_ were--precisely when it came. Rain never came straighter from
heaven."

"They?"--I stared.

"Yes; Silas and Hester--and Sidney--and Mingo. They must have started
soon after moonrise, and had the whole bright night, with its black
shadows, for going."

"For going where, auntie; going where?"

"Then the rain came in God's own hour," she continued, as if wholly to
herself, "and washed out their trail."

I sprang from the bed