for these two souls to meet. Yet it was far, and he feared, and ran with
startled eyes.

She stood on the island, ethereal, splendid, like some tall, dark, and
gorgeous flower of the storied East. The green and white of the cotton
billowed and foamed about her breasts; the red scarf burned upon her
neck; the dark brown velvet of her skin pulsed warm and tremulous with
the uprushing blood, and in the midnight depths of her great eyes flamed
the mighty fires of long-concealed and new-born love.

He darted through the trees and paused, a tall man strongly but slimly
made. He threw up his hands in the old way and hallooed; happily she
crooned back a low mother-melody, and waited. He came down to her
slowly, with fixed, hungry eyes, threading his way amid the Fleece. She
did not move, but lifted both her dark hands, white with cotton; and
then, as he came, casting it suddenly to the winds, in tears and
laughter she swayed and dropped quivering in his arms. And all the world
was sunshine and peace.

_Fifteen_

REVELATION

Harry Cresswell was scowling over his breakfast. It was not because his
apartment in the New York hotel was not satisfactory, or his breakfast
unpalatable; possibly a rather bewildering night in Broadway was
expressing its influence; but he was satisfied that his ill-temper was
due to a paragraph in the morning paper:

"It is stated on good authority that the widow of the late
multimillionaire, Job Grey, will announce a large and carefully planned
scheme of Negro education in the South, and will richly endow schools in
South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas."

Cresswell finally thrust his food away. He knew that Mrs. Grey helped
Miss Smith's school, and supposed she would continue to do so; with that
in mind he had striven to impress her, hoping that she might trust his
judgment in later years. He had no idea, however, that she meant to
endow the school, or entertained wholesale plans for Negro education.
The knowledge made him suspicious. Why had neither Mary nor John Taylor
mentioned this? Was there, after all, some "nigger-loving" conspiracy
back of the cotton combine? He took his hat and started down-town.

Once in John Taylor's Broadway office, he opened the subject
abruptly--the more so perhaps because he felt a resentment against
Taylor for certain unnamed or partially voiced assumptions. Here was a
place, however, for speech, and he spoke almost roughly.

"Taylor, w