occurred yesterday.

There was no sound in the glade to disturb Peter's thoughts except a
murmur of human voices from some of the innumerable privacies of the
place, and the occasional chirp of a waxwing busy over clusters of
cedar-balls.

It had been five weeks and a day since Caroline died. Five weeks and a
day; his mother's death drifting away into the mystery and oblivion of
the past. Likewise, twenty-five years of his own life completed and
gone.

A procession of sad, wistful thoughts trailed through Peter's brain: his
mother, and Ida May, and now Cissie. It seemed to Peter that all any
woman had ever brought him was wistfulness and sadness. His mother had
been jealous, and instead of the great happiness he had expected, his
home life with her had turned out a series of small perplexities and
pains. Before that was Ida May, and now here was her younger sister.
Peter wondered if any man ever reached the peace and happiness
foreshadowed in his dream of a woman.

* * * * *

A voice calling his name checked Peter's stride mechanically, and caused
him to look about with the slight bewilderment of a man aroused from a
reverie.

At the first sound, however, Jim Pink became suddenly alert. He took
three strides ahead of Peter, and as he went he whispered over his
shoulder:

"Beat it, nigger! beat it!"

The mulatto recognized one of Jim Pink's endless stupid attempts at
comedy. It would be precisely Jim Pink's idea of a jest to give Peter a
little start. As the mulatto stood looking about among the cedars for
the person who had called his name, it amazed him that Jim Pink could be
so utterly insane; that he performed some buffoonery instantly, by
reflex action as it were, upon the slightest provocation. It was almost
a mania with Jim Pink; it verged on the pathological.

The clown, however, was pressing his joke. He was pretending great fear,
and was shouting out in his loose minstrel voice:

"Hey, don' shoot down dis way, black man, tull I makes my exit!" And a
voice, rich with contempt, called back:

"You needn't be skeered, you fool rabbit of a nigger!"

Peter turned with a qualm. Quite close to him, and in another direction
from which he had been looking, stood Tump Pack. The ex-soldier looked
the worse for wear after his jail sentence. His uniform was frayed, and
over his face lay a grayish cast that marks negroes in bad condition. At
his side, attached by a