easier, seeing him in servile duty. Someway, she knew not just how, she
found herself telling him of the crisis in her life before she realized;
not everything, of course, but a great deal. It was much as though she
were talking to some one from another world--an outsider; but one she
had known long, one who understood. Both from what she recounted and
what she could not tell he gathered the substance of the story, and it
bewildered him. He had not thought that white people had such troubles;
yet, he reflected, why not? They, too, were human.

"I suppose you hear from the school?" he ventured after a pause.

"Why, yes--not directly--but Zora used to speak of it."

Bles looked up quickly.

"Zora?"

"Yes. Didn't you see her while she was here? She has gone back now."

Then the gate opened, the crowd surged through, sweeping them apart, and
next moment he was alone.

Alwyn turned slowly away. He forgot the friend he was to meet. He forgot
everything but the field of the Silver Fleece. It rose shadowy there in
the pale concourse, swaying in ghostly breezes. The purple of its
flowers mingled with the silver radiance of tendrils that trembled
across the hurrying throng, like threads of mists along low hills. In
its midst rose a dark, slim, and quivering form. She had been here--here
in Washington! Why had he not known? What was she doing? "She has gone
back now"--back to the Sun and the Swamp, back to the Burden.

Why should not he go back, too? He walked on thinking. He had failed.
His apparent success had been too sudden, too overwhelming, and when he
had faced the crisis his hand had trembled. He had chosen the Right--but
the Right was ineffective, impotent, almost ludicrous. It left him
shorn, powerless, and in moral revolt. The world had suddenly left him,
as the vision of Carrie Wynn had left him, alone, a mere clerk, an
insignificant cog in the great grinding wheel of humdrum drudgery. His
chance to do and thereby to be had not come.

He thought of Zora again. Why not go back to the South where she had
gone? He shuddered as one who sees before him a cold black pool whither
his path leads. To face the proscription, the insult, the lawless hate
of the South again--never! And yet he went home and sat down and wrote a
long letter to Miss Smith.

The reply that came after some delay was almost curt. It answered few of
his questions, argued with none of his doubts, and made no mention of
Zora. Yes, there was need