of a manager for the new farm and settlement.
She was not sure whether Alwyn could do the work or not. The salary was
meagre and the work hard. If he wished it, he must decide immediately.

Two weeks later found Alwyn on the train facing Southward in the Jim
Crow car. How he had decided to go back South he did not know. In fact,
he had not decided. He had sat helpless and inactive in the grip of
great and shadowed hands, and the thing was as yet incomprehensible. And
so it was that the vision Zora saw in the swamp had been real enough,
and Alwyn felt strangely disappointed that she had given no sign of
greeting on recognition.

In other ways, too, Zora, when he met her, was to him a new creature.
She came to him frankly and greeted him, her gladness shining in her
eyes, yet looking nothing more than gladness and saying nothing more.
Just what he had expected was hard to say; but he had left her on her
knees in the dirt with outstretched hands, and somehow he had expected
to return to some corresponding mental attitude. The physical change of
these three years was marvellous. The girl was a woman, well-rounded and
poised, tall, straight, and quick. And with this went mental change: a
self-mastery; a veiling of the self even in intimate talk; a subtle air
as of one looking from great and unreachable heights down on the dawn of
the world. Perhaps no one who had not known the child and the girl as he
had would have noted all this; but he saw and realized the
transformation with a pang--something had gone; the innocence and wonder
of the child, and in their place had grown up something to him
incomprehensible and occult.

Miss Smith was not to be easily questioned on the subject. She took no
hints and gave no information, and when once he hazarded some pointed
questions she turned on him abruptly, observing acidly: "If I were you
I'd think less of Zora and more of her work."

Gradually, in his spiritual perplexity, Alwyn turned to Mary Cresswell.
She was staying with the Colonel at Cresswell Oaks. Her coming South was
supposed to be solely for reasons of health, and her appearance made
this excuse plausible. She was lonely and restless, and naturally drawn
toward the school. Her intercourse with Miss Smith was only formal, but
her interest in Zora's work grew. Down in the swamp, at the edge of the
cleared space, had risen a log cabin; long, low, spacious, overhung with
oak and pine. It was Zora's centre for her settlement