of the city, and from the
servants' quarters of the house, voices, the sound of a mat being beaten
and now and then the angry screech of a parrot. General Grant slept in the
kitchen and his cage was put out in the yard every morning at this hour.
Later it would be brought round to the piazza. He resented the kitchen
yard as beneath his dignity and he let people know it.

Phyl tried the garden gate, it was locked and Seth appearing at that
moment on the lower piazza, she called to him to fetch the key. He let her
out and she stood for a moment undecided as to whether she would walk
towards the Battery or in the opposite direction. Meeting Street never
looked more charming than now in the very early morning sunlight; under
the haze-blue sky, almost deserted, it seemed for a moment to have
recaptured its youth. A negro crab vendor was wheeling his barrow along,
crying his wares. His voice came lazily on the warm scented air.

She turned in the direction of the station. The voice of the crab seller
had completed in some uncanny way the charm of the deserted street and the
early sunlight. She was going to lose all this. Vernons and the city she
loved, Juliet, Miss Pinckney, the past and the present, she was going to
lose them all, they were all in some miraculous way part of the man she
loved, her love of them was part of her love for him. She could no longer
stay in Charleston; she must go--where? She could think of nowhere to go
but Ireland.

To stay here would be absolutely impossible.

As she walked without noticing whither she was going her mind cleared, she
began to form plans.

She would go that very day. Nothing would stop her. The thing had to be
done. Let it be done at once. She would explain everything to Miss
Pinckney. She would escape without seeing Richard again. What she was
proposing to herself was death, the ruin of everything she cared for, the
destruction of all the ties that bound her to the world, the present and
the past. It was the recognition that these ties had been broken for her
and all these things taken away by the woman who had taken away Richard.

Presently she found herself in the suburbs, in a street where coloured
children were playing in the gutter, and where the houses were
unsubstantial looking as rabbit-hutches, but there was a glimpse of
country beyond and she did not turn back. She did not want breakfast. If
she returned to Vernons by ten o'clock it would give her plenty of time t