en," and she began to
read--poetry, prose at random.

The Prophet did not know, he had never been trained to know--as few men
ever are trained--how to combat feminine malice and spoiled power. He
listened, but not with averted eyes. Prebol, himself a spectator at a
scene different from any he had ever witnessed, was still enough more
sophisticated to know what she was doing, and he was delighted.

By and by the injured man drifted into slumber, but Rasba gave no sign
of flagging interest, no traces of a mind astray from the subject at
hand. He felt that he must make the most of this revelation, which came
after the countless revelations which he had had since arriving down the
river. There was a fear clutching at his heart that it might end; that
in a moment this woman might depart and leave him unenlightened, and
unable ever to find for himself the unimaginable world of words which
she plucked out of those books and pinned into the great vacant spaces
of his mind which he had kept empty all these years--not knowing that he
was waiting for this night, when he should have the Mississippi bring
into his eddy, alongside his own mission boat, what he most needed.

He sat there, a great, pathetic figure, shaggy, his heart thumping,
taking from this trim, neat, beautiful woman the riches which she so
casually, almost wantonly, threw to him in passing.

The corridors of his mind echoed to the tread of hosts; he heard the
rumblings of history, the songs of poets whose words are pitched to the
music of the skies, and he hung word pictures which Ruskin had painted
in his imagination.

Fate had waited long to give him this night. It had waited till the man
was ready, then with a lavish hand the storehouses of the master
intellects of the world were opened to him, for him to help himself.
Nelia suddenly started up from her chair and looked around, herself the
victim of her own raillery, which had grown to be an understanding of
the pathetic hunger of the man for these things.

It was daylight, and the flood of the sunrise was at hand.

"Parson," she said, "do you like these things--these books?"

"Missy," he whispered, "I could near repeat, word for word, all those
things you've said and read to me to-night."

"There are lots more," she laughed. "I want to do something for your
mission boat, will you let me?"

"Lawse! Yo've he'ped me now more'n yo' know!"

She smiled the smile that women have had from all the ages, for