ain
sumptuously, he was again a Southern gentleman of the older school, and
so in his envied element. Yet today he frowned as he stood poking
absently with his cane at the baled Fleece.

This marriage--or, rather, these marriages--were not to his liking. It
was a _mesalliance_ of a sort that pricked him tenderly; it savored
grossly of bargain and sale. His neighbors regarded it with
disconcerting equanimity. They seemed to think an alliance with
Northern millions an honor for Cresswell blood, and the Colonel thumped
the nearer bale vigorously. His cane slipped along the iron bands
suddenly, and the old man lurching forward, clutched in space to save
himself and touched a human hand.

Zora, sitting shadowed on the farther bale, drew back her hand quickly
at the contact, and started to move away.

"Who's that?" thundered the Colonel, more angry at his involuntary
fright than at the intrusion. "Here, boys!"

But Zora had come forward into the space where the sunlight of the wide
front doors poured in upon the cotton bales.

"It's me, Colonel," she said.

He glared at her. She was taller and thinner than formerly, darkly
transparent of skin, and her dark eyes shone in strange and dusky
brilliance. Still indignant and surprised, the Colonel lifted his voice
sharply.

"What the devil are you doing here?--sleeping when you ought to be at
work! Get out! And see here, next week cotton chopping begins--you'll go
to the fields or to the chain-gang. I'll have no more of your loafing
about my place."

Awaiting no reply, the Colonel, already half ashamed of his vehemence,
stormed out into the sunlight and climbed upon his bay mare.

But Zora still stood silent in the shadow of the Silver Fleece, hearing
and yet not hearing. She was searching for the Way, groping for the
threads of life, seeking almost wildly to understand the foundations of
understanding, piteously asking for answer to the puzzle of life. All
the while the walls rose straight about her and narrow. To continue in
school meant charity, yet she had nowhere to go and nothing to go with.
To refuse to work for the Cresswells meant trouble for the school and
perhaps arrest for herself. To work in the fields meant endless toil and
a vista that opened upon death.

Like a hunted thing the girl turned and twisted in thought and faced
everywhere the blank Impossible. Cold and dreamlike without, her shut
teeth held back seething fires within, and a spirit of revolt t