le evening,
with music and with never an allusion to an unpleasant subject, but
there was something finer than an allusion, and it had passed from
husband to wife and back again--a look at each other and a glance toward
Louise. But they had laughed at the girl's imitation of a cakewalk, and
yet in the minds of the father and the mother was the low echo of a
hollow cough. Affectionately she had kissed them good night, and had
started off down the hall in mimicry of a negro belle's walk, but they
had heard her door shut with a quick slam as if she were at last
impelled to be truthful with herself, to close herself in with her own
meditations.

The Major hung his watch on a nail above the mantel-piece. From a
far-off nook of the sprawling old house came the pling-plang of the
boy's banjo.

"Margaret?"

"Yes, dear."

"What did you say to her?"

She began to fold the newspaper. "I didn't say anything. She wouldn't
permit me."

"What do you think?"

"That she will do as she pleases."

"Consoling, by the--consoling, I must say. But I tell you she won't. I
will shame her out of it."

CHAPTER VI.

The top of the cotton stalk glimmered with a purple bloom, but down
between the rows, among the dying leaves, the first bolls were opening.
The air was still hot, for at noontime the glare in the sandy road was
fierce, but the evening was cool, and from out in the gleaming dew came
a sweetly, lonesome chirrup, an alarm in the grass, the picket of the
insect army, crying the approach of frost. In the atmosphere was felt
the influence of a reviving activity; new cotton pens were built along
the borders of the fields, and the sounds of hammer and saw were heard
in the neighborhood of the gin-house. With the dusk of Saturday evening
"new" negroes came. In the city they had idled the summer away,
gambling, and had now come with nimble fingers to pick cotton during the
day and with tricky hands to throw dice at night. Gaunt, long-legged
birds flew from the North and awkwardly capered on a sand-bar. Afar off
there appeared to hover over the landscape a pall of thin, pale smoke;
but, like the end of the rainbow, it stole back from closer view, was
always afar off, lying low to the earth. The autumn rains had not yet
set in, and the water in the bayou was low and yellow. The summer
grapes were ripe, and in the cool, shaded coves at the base of the hills
the muscadine was growing purple. The mules, so over-worked during
p