terranean ways where abstract principles are not. "You
ain' done furgot 'im, Marster," she added piteously. "He 'uz born jes
two mont's atter Miss Lindy turnt me outer hyer--en he's jes ez w'ite ez
ef'n he b'longed ter w'ite folks."

But she had gone too far--she had outraged that curious Anglo-Saxon
instinct in Cyrus which permitted him to sin against his race's
integrity, yet forbade him to acknowledge, even to himself, that he bore
any part in the consequences of that sin. Illogical, he might have
admitted, but there are some truths so poisonous that no honest man
could breathe the same air with them.

Taking out his pocket-book, he slowly drew a fifty dollar bill from its
innermost recesses, and as slowly unfolded it. He always handled money
in that careful fashion--a habit which he had inherited from his father
and his grandfather before him, and of which he was entirely
unconscious. Filtering down through so many generations, the mannerism
had ceased at last to be merely a physical peculiarity, and had become
strangely spiritual in its suggestion. The craving for possession, the
singleness of desire, the tenacity of grasp, the dread of
relinquishment, the cold-blooded determination to keep intact the thing
which it had cost so much to acquire--all that was bound up in the
spirit of Cyrus Treadwell, and all that would pass at last with that
spirit from off the earth, was expressed in the gesture with which he
held out the bit of paper to the woman who had asked for his help. "Take
this--it is all I can do for you," he said, "and don't come whining
around me any more. Black or white, the man that commits a murder has
got to hang for it."

A sound broke from the negress that resembled a human cry of grief less
than it did the inarticulate moan of an animal in mortal pain. Then it
stopped suddenly, strangled by that dull weight of usage beneath which
the primal impulse in her was crushed back into silence. Instinctively,
as if in obedience to some reflex action, she reached out and took the
money from his hand, and still instinctively, with the dazed look of one
who performs in delirium the customary movements of every day, she fell
back, holding her apron deprecatingly aside while he brushed past her.
And in her eyes as she gazed after him there dawned the simple wonder of
the brute that asks of Life why it suffers.

Beyond the alley into which the gate opened, Cyrus caught sight of
Gabriel's erect figure hurryin