reek by a wooden bridge and came to a row of mean houses standing
flush with the street. At the door of one, an old black woman had
stooped to lift a large basket, piled high with laundered clothes. The
girl, as she passed, seized one end of the basket and helped the old
woman to raise it to her head, where it rested solidly on the cushion
of her head-kerchief. During this interlude, Warwick, though he had
slackened his pace measurably, had so nearly closed the gap between
himself and them as to hear the old woman say, with the dulcet negro
intonation:--

"T'anky', honey; de Lawd gwine bless you sho'. You wuz alluz a good
gal, and de Lawd love eve'ybody w'at he'p de po' ole nigger. You gwine
ter hab good luck all yo' bawn days."

"I hope you're a true prophet, Aunt Zilphy," laughed the girl in
response.

The sound of her voice gave Warwick a thrill. It was soft and sweet and
clear--quite in harmony with her appearance. That it had a faint
suggestiveness of the old woman's accent he hardly noticed, for the
current Southern speech, including his own, was rarely without a touch
of it. The corruption of the white people's speech was one
element--only one--of the negro's unconscious revenge for his own
debasement.

The houses they passed now grew scattering, and the quarter of the town
more neglected. Warwick felt himself wondering where the girl might be
going in a neighborhood so uninviting. When she stopped to pull a
half-naked negro child out of a mudhole and set him upon his feet, he
thought she might be some young lady from the upper part of the town,
bound on some errand of mercy, or going, perhaps, to visit an old
servant or look for a new one. Once she threw a backward glance at
Warwick, thus enabling him to catch a second glimpse of a singularly
pretty face. Perhaps the young woman found his presence in the
neighborhood as unaccountable as he had deemed hers; for, finding his
glance fixed upon her, she quickened her pace with an air of startled
timidity.

"A woman with such a figure," thought Warwick, "ought to be able to
face the world with the confidence of Phryne confronting her judges."

By this time Warwick was conscious that something more than mere grace
or beauty had attracted him with increasing force toward this young
woman. A suggestion, at first faint and elusive, of something
familiar, had grown stronger when he heard her voice, and became more
and more pronounced with each rod of the