Chorus, "Pra-aise Gawd!"

The master replied. He was majestically kind. He commended their
exceptional good sense and prophesied a reign of humble trust and
magnanimous protection.--"But I see you're all--" he smiled a gracious
irony--"anxious to get back to work."

They laughed, pushed and smote one another, and went, while he mounted
the stairs; they, strangers to the sufferings of his mind, and he as
ignorant as many a far vaster autocrat of the profound failure of his
words to satisfy the applauding people he left below him.

In the hall Jeff-Jack let Barbara down. Thump-thump-thump--she ran to
find Johanna. A fear and a hope quite filled her with their strife, the
mortifying fear that at the brook Mr. Ravenel had observed--and the
reinspiring hope that he had failed to observe--that she was without
shoes! She remained away for some time, and came back shyly in softly
squeaking leather. As he took her on his knee she asked, carelessly:

"Did you ever notice I'm dot socks on to-day?" and when he cried "No!"
and stroked them, she silently applauded her own tact.

Virginia and her mistress decided that the supper would have to be
totally reconsidered--reconstructed. Jeff-Jack and Barbara, the reticule
on her arm, walked in the grove where the trees were few. The flat
out-croppings of gray and yellow rocks made grotesque figures in the
grass, and up from among the cedar sprouts turtle-doves sprang with that
peculiar music of their wings, flew into distant coverts, and from one
such to another tenderly complained of love's alarms and separations.
When Barbara asked her escort where his home was, he said it was going
to be in Suez, and on cross-examination explained that Flatrock was only
a small plantation where his sister lived and took care of his father,
who was old and sick.

He seemed to Barbara to be very easily amused, even laughing at some
things she said which she did not intend for jokes at all. But since he
laughed she laughed too, though with more reserve. They picked wild
flowers. He gave her forget-me-nots.

They did not bring their raging hunger into the house again until the
large tea-bell rang in the porch, and the air was rife with the
fragrance of Aunt Virginia's bounty: fried ham, fried eggs, fried
chicken, strong coffee, and hot biscuits--of fresh Yankee flour from
Suez. No wine, and no tonic before sitting down. In the pulpit and out
of it Garnet had ever been an ardent advocate of total abst