It was fifteen years ago to-day; yet I can still see that road stretching through vine-like shadows into the spring landscape.

Though I was never in Virginia before, I had been brought up on the traditions of my mother’s old home on the Rappahannock; and when the invitation came to spend a week with my unknown cousins, the Blantons, at Whispering Leaves, I was filled with a delightful sense of expectancy and adventure. None of my family had ever seen the present owner of the place—one Pelham Blanton, a man of middle age, who was, as far as we were aware, without a history. All I knew of him was that his first wife had died at the birth of a child about seven years before, and that immediately afterward he had married one of his neighbours, a common person, my mother insisted, though she had heard nothing of the second wife except that her name before her marriage was Twine. Whether the child of the first wife had lived or not we did not know, for the letters from the family had stopped, and we had no further news of the place until I wrote from Richmond asking permission to visit the house in which my mother and so many of my grandmothers were born.

The spring came early that year. When I descended from the train into the green and gold of the afternoon, I felt almost as if I were stepping back into some old summer. An ancient family carriage, drawn by two drowsy black horses with flowing tails, was waiting for me under a blossoming locust tree; and as soon as my foot touched the ground I was greeted affectionately by the coloured driver, who still called my mother “Miss Effie.” He was an imposing, ceremonious old man, very nearly as black as the horses, with a mass of white hair, which is unusual in a negro, and a gay bandanna handkerchief crossed over his chest. After an unconscionable wait for the mail, he brought the dilapidated leather pouch from the office, and tossed it on the floor of the carriage. A minute later, as he mounted over the wheel to his seat, he glanced back at me and remarked in an encouraging tone, “dar ain’ nuttin’ to hinder us now.”

“How far is it to Whispering Leaves, Uncle Moab?”

The old negro pondered the question while he flicked the reins over the broad swaying backs of the horses. He was so long in replying that, thinking he had forgotten to answer, I repeated the words more distinctly.

“Can you tell me how far it is to Whispering Leaves?”

At this he turned and looked back at me over his shoulder. “I reckon hit’s sum un like ten miles, or mebbe hit’s gwine on twelve,” he responded.

“When did you leave there?”

Again there was a long silence while we jogged sleepily out of the deeply shaded streets of the little village. “I ain’ been dar dis mawnin’, Miss Effie,” he answered at last.

“Why, I thought you lived there?”

I was so accustomed by this time to the slowness of his responses that I waited patiently until he brought out with hesitation, “I use’ ter.”

“Then you are no longer the family coachman?”

He shook his head above the bandanna handkerchief, and I could see his deep perplexity written in the brown creases of his neck. “Yas’m. I’se still de driver.”

“But how can you be if you don’t live on the place?”

“One er dem w’ite sarvants brungs de car’ige down ter de creek, en I tecks en drives hit along de road,” he replied. “I goes dar in de daytime,” he added impressively after a minute. “Dar’s some un um ain’ never set foot dar sence we all moved off, but I ain’ skeered er nuttin’, sweet Jesus, in de daytime.”

“Do you mean that all the old servants moved off together?”

“Yas’m. Ev’y last one un um. Dey’s all w’ite folks dar now.”

“When did that happen?”

But, as I was beginning to discover, time and space are the flimsiest abstractions in the imagination of the negro. “Hit wuz a long time ago. Miss Effie,” replied Uncle Moab. “Pell, he wa’n much mo’n a baby den. He wuz jes’ in dresses, en he’s done been in breeches now fur a pa’cel er Christmas times.”

“Pell? Is that the child of the first Mrs. Blanton?”

“Yas’m. He’s Miss Clarissa’s chile. Miss Hannah Twine, she’s got a heap er chillun; dar’s two pa’cel er twins en den de baby dat wuz bo’n las’ winter. But Pell, he ain’t ’er chile.”

I was beginning to see light. “Then Pell must be about seven years old, and you moved off the place while he was still in short dresses. That must have been just four or five years ago.”

“Dat’s hit, honey, dat’s hit.”

“And all the coloured servants moved away at the same time?”

“De same day. Dar wa’nt er one un um lef dar by sundown.”

“And they’ve had to have white servants ever since?”

“Dey’s all w’ite ones dat stays on atter sundown. De coloured folks dey goes back in de daytime, but dey don’t stay on twell supper. Naw’m, dar ain’ noner dem but de w’ite folks dat stays on ter git supper.”

While I questioned him the drowsy horses trotted slowly through the sun and shadow on the dun-coloured road. The air was fragrant with mingled wood scents and honeysuckle. A sky of flowerlike blue shone overhead. Now and then a redbird, flying low, darted across the road, and far off in the trees there was the sound of a joyous chorus.

“I never saw so many redbirds, Uncle Moab.”

“Yas’m. Dar sutney is er plenty er dem dis yeah. Hit’s a bird yeah, sho nuff. Hit pears ter me like I cyarn’ put my foot outside er my do’ dat I don’t moughty near step on er robin, en I ain’ never hearn tell er sech er number uv blue jays. De blue jay he’s de meanest bird dat ever wuz, but he sutney is got er heap er sense. He knows jes ez well on w’ich side his bread is buttered ez ef’n he wuz sho nuff folks. Hi! Don’ you begin ter study ’bout birds twel you git to W’is-perin’ Leaves. Hit seems dat ar place wuz jes made ter drive folks bird crazy. Dey’s ev’ry-whar’ dose birds. De wrens en de phoebes dey’s in de po’ch, en de swallows dey’s in de chimleys, en de res’ un um is calling ter you en pesterin’ de life outer you in de trees.”

Well, I liked birds! If there were nothing more dangerous than birds at Whispering Leaves, I could be happy there.

While we jogged on there crept over me the feeling of restlessness, of wistful yet indefinable desire, which is the very essence of spring. My thoughts had been brushed for an instant by that magic spirit of beauty; and I saw the wide landscape, with its flushed meadows sinking into the grapelike bloom of the distance, as if it were a part, not of the actual world, but of a universe painted on air, as transparent as the faintly coloured shadows across the road. In the thick woods on the left delicate green appeared to rise and fall like the foam of the sea. Accustomed as I was to the late northern season, there was an intoxication in this spring which was as flowery as June. A bird year, the old coachman had called it; but a miraculous spring it seemed to me, with its bright soft winds, as sweet as honey, and its far, serene sky. And from the fragrant woods and rosy meadows there floated always the joyous piping of invisible birds; of birds hidden in low thickets; of birds high in the misty woods; of birds by the silver stream in the pasture; of birds flying swiftly into the impalpable shadows.

“I thought birds were quiet in the afternoon, Uncle Moab?”

“Dey ain’ never quiet heah, honey. Dey chatters even in de night time. Dey don’ hoi’ dere tongues fur nuttin’, not even w’en de snow is on de groun’.”

Gradually, after what seemed to me to be hours of that monotonous pace, the light on the road faded slowly to a delicate primrose. The sun was setting beyond the rich woods on the horizon, and a thin clear veil, like silver tissue, was dropping over the spring landscape. Presently, as we came under the gloom of arching boughs, the old negro turned the heads of the horses and scrambled down from the coachman’s seat.

“I ain’ gwine no furder den dis, Miss Effie,” he explained; and then, as the gate swung open, I saw that a young white man had run forward to unfasten it. When the old negro, with a pull at his front lock, had shuffled off in the direction of the sunset, the young man made a bound into the driver’s seat and jerked up the reins.

“Does Uncle Moab live near here?” I inquired. “About a mile up the road, miss. Mr. Blanton gave him the cabin at the fork when he moved away.”

“I wonder why he moved?”

The young man broke into a cheery laugh. “When a darkey once gets a notion in his head, the only way to get it out is with an ax,” he retorted; and a minute later he added: “I reckon you don’t know much about the darkeys up North?”

“Very little,” I conceded, and we drove on in silence.

The road into which we had turned was a narrow private way, very steep and rocky, which led between rotting “worm” fences and neglected fields to a dense avenue of cedars on the brow of the hill. As we went on, I wondered why the fields so near the house should be abandoned. The remains of last year’s harvest still strewed the ragged furrows, and against the skyline on the top of the hill there was a desolate row of corn stubble. Presently, as the carriage jolted over the rocky road, I heard the sound of barking, or, as it seemed to me at that sombre hour, the kind of baying to which hounds give voice on moonlit nights. Then, when we reached the high ground at last, I found that two black and yellow hounds were sitting amid the naked cornstalks and barking at our approach.

“Won’t these fields be planted this year?” I asked in surprise.

“We can’t get any of the darkeys to work here,” replied the driver. “They are too near the house.”

As we came to the brow of the hill the dogs ran to meet us, and then, after a few barks of welcome, turned and padded on noiselessly beside the horses. Between us and the beginning of the cedar avenue there was a clear space of road, and when we reached this the veil over the sunset parted suddenly like a curtain, and a glow, which I can compare to nothing except clouded amber, suffused the horizon and the abandoned cornfields. In this glow I discerned the gigantic shape of an old mulberry tree near the avenue; and the next instant I made out, amid the foliage on the high boughs, the lightly poised figure of a little boy in a blue cotton suit, with a mass of streaming ruddy curls.

“Why, he might slip and fall,” I thought; and the words had scarcely formed themselves in my mind, when the little figure turned sharply, as if in terror, and uttered a cry of alarm.

“Mammy, I am falling!” he called out, as his feet slipped from the bough.

I had already made a spring from the carriage, with the sunset dazzling my eyes, when an old negro woman emerged swiftly from the underbrush by the fence, and caught the child in her arms. In that instant of terror, while my eyes were still filled with the sunset, I observed only that the woman was tall and straight like an Indian, and that her face, framed in a red turban, was as brown and wrinkled as a November leaf. Then, as she placed the child on his feet, I saw that her features were irradiated, by a passion of tenderness which gave it a strange glow like the burning light of the sunset.

“You saved his life!” I started to cry; but before I could utter the words she vanished into the shadow of the mulberry tree, and left the boy standing alone in the road.

“You might have been killed,”! said sternly as I reached him, for I was still trembling from the fright he had given me.

The boy looked up with a strange elfin glee—there is no other word for it—in his face. “I knew Mammy would catch me,” he responded defiantly.

“Suppose she hadn’t been here?” As I spoke I looked about me for the old negress.

At this the child laughed shrilly, with a sound that was like the ironic mirth of an old man. “She is always where I am,” he replied.

He was a queer child, I thought as I gazed at him, ugly and pinched, and yet with a charm which I felt from the first moment my eyes fell on him. There was a defiant shyness in his manner, and his little face, under the flaming curls, was too thin and pale for healthy childhood. But, in spite of his strangeness, I had never in my life been so strongly attracted, so completely drawn, to a child.

“You must be Pell!” I exclaimed, after a pause in which I had watched him in silence.

He stared at me critically. “Yes, I am Pell. How did you know?”

“Oh, I’ve heard about you. Uncle Moab told me on the way over.”

At the name of Uncle Moab his face grew less blank and hard. “Where is he?” he asked, turning to the driver. “I was going down to the gate to meet him. I want him to mend my kite.”

“Uncle Moab went on to his cabin,” answered the young man, and I noticed that he subdued his tone as he might have done to an ill person or a startled colt.

“Then I’ll go after him,” replied the child. “I am not afraid.”

With a bound he started down the steep road, running in restless leaps, with his bright curls blown out like an aureole round his head. The two black and yellow hounds, jumping up from the stubble, followed, as noiseless as shadows, on his trail; and in a few minutes the three shapes melted into the obscurity of the fields.

When I was in the carriage again I remarked inquiringly to the driver: “For a delicate child he does not appear to be timid.”

“Not out of doors. He is never afraid out of doors. In the house they have a good deal of trouble with him.”

“Do the other children look so thin and pale?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. The other children are healthy enough. They don’t get on well with this one, and that’s why he stays out of the house whenever they’ll let him, even when it is raining. Pell is the child of the first Mrs. Blanton.”

“Yes, I know. Were you here in her time?”

“No, I came afterward. The year the darkeys moved away. But anybody can see how different she must have been from this one, who is the daughter of old Mr. Twine, the miller. She kept house for Mr. Blanton after his first wife died.” This was news to me, for I was absolutely ignorant of the family circumstances. I was eager to learn more of the story; but I could not gossip about my relatives with a stranger, so I said merely,

“Then she brought up the child—Pell, I mean?” Though the driver’s back was turned to me, I could see by the stubborn shake of his head that my question had aroused an unpleasant train of reflections. “No, Pell’s mammy took care of him until he was five years old. She had nursed his mother before him. I reckon she belonged to the family of the first Mrs. Blanton and came to Whispering Leaves with the bride. I never saw her. She died before my time here; but they say that as long as the old woman lived Pell never knew what it was to miss his mother. Mammy Rhody—that was her name—had promised the first Mrs. Blanton when she was dying that she would never let the child out of her sight; and they say she kept her promise to the dead as long as she lived. Whenever you saw Pell there was Mammy Rhody, sure enough, with her eyes on him. She slept in the room with him, and she always stood behind his high chair when they had him down to the table. Darkeys are like that, I reckon. A vow’s a vow. When she swore she’d never take her eyes off him, she meant just what she said.”

“The child must miss her terribly?”

Again I saw that stubborn shake of his head. “The queer part is that the boy insists she ain’t dead. Nothing they can do to him—Mrs. Blanton has talked to him by the hour—will make him admit that Mammy Rhody is dead. He says she plays with him just as she used to, and that all these birds you hear about Whispering Leaves are the ones that she tamed for him. Birds! Well, there never was, they say, such a hand with birds as Mammy Rhody. She could tame anything going from an eagle to a wren, I’ve heard, and some of the darkeys have got the notion that the woods about here are still full of the ghosts of Mammy Rhody’s pets. They say it ain’t natural for birds to call in and out of season as they do around Whispering Leaves.”

“And does Pell believe this also?”

“Nobody knows, ma’am, just how much Pell believes. They’ve tried to stop all that foolishness because it turns the heads of the darkeys.

“You can’t get one of them to stay on the place after sunset, not for love or money. It all started with the way Pell goes about talking to himself. Holy Moses! I ain’t skeery myself, ma’am, for a big fellow like me, but it gives me the creeps sometimes when I watch that child playing by himself in the shrubbery and hear him talking to somebody that ain’t there. He does the queerest things, too, just like climbing out on that high limb and calling out to his mammy that he was going to fall.”

“He might have been badly hurt if somebody hadn’t caught him,” I said.

The driver laughed politely, as if I had made a poor joke which he accepted on faith though he missed the humour. “He goes on pretending like that all the time,” he returned.

“But the old coloured woman, the one who caught him? Who is she?” I asked.

At this the man turned sharply, letting the reins fall on the backs of the horses. “The old coloured woman?” he repeated inquiringly.

“I mean the tall one in the black dress, with the white apron and the red turban on her head.” There was a slight asperity in my tone, for it seemed to me the man was incredibly stupid.

The blankness—or was it suspicion?—in his face deepened. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody,” he answered presently.

Turning his head away from me again, he gathered up the reins and urged the horses with a clucking noise into the long avenue of cedars.

Dusk, dusk, dusk. As we drove on rapidly beneath the high, closely woven arch of the cedars, I was conscious again of a deep intuitive feeling that the world in which I moved was as unreal as the surroundings in a dream. Dreamlike, too, were my own sensations as I passed into that greenish twilight which shut out the light of the afterglow. Feathery branches edged with brighter green brushed my cheeks like the wings of a bird; and though I knew it must be only my fancy, I seemed to hear a hundred jubilant notes in the enchanted gloom of the trees.

Presently, as if the thought were suggested by that imaginary music, I found myself returning to the old negress. Surely, if she had merely hastened on in front of us, we must overtake her before we reached the end of the avenue. Wherever the shadows crowded more thickly, wherever there was a sudden stir in the underbrush, I peered eagerly into the obscurity, hoping that we had at last come up with the old woman, and that I might offer her a place in the carriage. Though I had had only the briefest glimpse of her, I had found her serene leaf-brown face strangely attractive, almost, I thought oddly enough, as if her mysterious black eyes, under the heavy brows, had penetrated to some secret chamber of my memory. I had never seen her before, and yet I felt as if I had known her all my life, particularly in some half-forgotten childhood which haunted me like a dream. Could it be that she had nursed my mother and my grandmother, and that she saw a resemblance to the children she had trained in her youth? Stranger still, I felt not only that she recognized me, but that she possessed some secret which she wished to confide to me, that she was charged with a profoundly significant message which, sooner or later, she would find an opportunity to deliver.

As we went on, the hope that we should overtake her increased with every foot of the road. I stared into the mass of shadows. I started at every rustle on the scented ground. But still I caught no further glimpse of her; and at last, while I was gazing breathlessly beneath the cedars, we came out of the avenue on the edge of an open lawn, which was sown with small star-shaped flowers of palest blue. In front of me there were other ancient cedars, seven in number; and farther off, beyond the row of cedars, there was a long white house standing against the pomegranate-coloured afterglow, where a little horned moon was sailing.

I can shut my eyes now, after all these years, and summon back the scene as vividly as I saw it when we emerged from the long stretch of twilight. I can still see the blue glimmer of the flowers in the grass; the low house, with deep wings, where the stucco was peeling from the red brick beneath a delicate tracery of Virginia creeper; the seven pyramidal cedars guarding the hooded roof of gray shingles; and the clear afterglow in which the little moon sailed like a ship. Fifteen years ago! And I have not forgotten so much as the spiral pattern the Virginia creeper made on the pinkish white of the wall.

“Are there no trees,” I asked, “except cedars?” The driver lifted his whip and pointed over the roof. “You never saw such elms. I reckon there ain’t any finer trees in the country, but they’re all at the back, every last one of ’em. Mr. Blanton’s grandfather had a notion that cedars didn’t mix, and he wouldn’t have any other trees planted in front.”

I understood as I looked, in the flushed evening air, at the dark trees presiding over the approach to the house, with its Ionic columns and its quaint wings, added, one could see, long after the original walls were built. The drooping eaves, I knew, sheltered a multitude of wrens and phoebes, and the whole place was alive with swallows, which dipped and wheeled under the glowing sky.

We turned briskly into the circular drive, and a few minutes later, when we stopped before the walk of sunken flagstones, the driver jumped down and assisted me to descend. As I reached the porch, the door opened in a leisurely manner, and my cousin Pelham, a tall, relaxed, indolent-looking man of middle age, with gray hair, brilliant dark eyes and an air of pensive resignation, came out to receive me. I had heard, or had formed some vague idea, that the family had “run to seed,” as they say in the South, and my first view of Cousin Pelham helped to fix this impression more firmly in my mind. He looked, I thought, a man who had ceased to desire anything intensely except physical comfort.

“So this is Cousin Effie’s daughter,” he remarked by way of greeting, as he stooped and placed a perfunctory kiss on my cheek.

Beyond him I saw a large angular woman, with massive features and hair of ambiguous brown, and I inferred, from the baby in her arms and four sturdy children at her skirts, that she was the “Miss Hannah,” for whom Uncle Moab had prepared me. She appeared to me then and afterward to be a woman who was proficient in the art of making a man comfortable, and who hadn’t, as the phrase goes, “a nerve in her body.”

After greeting me cordially enough in her dry fashion, she directed the driver to take my bag upstairs to “the red room.”

“I hope you can do without your trunk until to-morrow,” she added. “All the teams have been ploughing to-day, and we couldn’t send over to the station.”

I replied that I could do very well without it since I had brought my travelling bag. Then, after a few questions from Cousin Pelham about my mother, whom he had not seen since they were both children at Whispering Leaves, Mrs. Blanton led me into the wide hall, where I saw a picture, framed in the open back door, of clustering elms and a flagged walk which ran down into a sunken garden. A minute later, while we ascended the circular staircase, with its beautifully carved balustrade, I found my eyes turning toward that vision of spring which I had seen through the open door.

“How white it looks out there in the garden,” I said. “It seems carpeted with moonlight.”

She bent her head indifferently to glance over the balustrade. “That’s narcissus. It’s in full bloom now,” she answered. “The first Mrs. Blanton” (she might have been speaking of some one she had just left on the porch) “planted the whole garden in those flowers, and we have never got rid of them. The poet’s narcissus, Mr. Blanton calls it.”

“There are lilacs, too,” I responded, for the cool dim hall was filled with the fragrance which seemed to me to be the secret of spring.

“Oh, yes, there are a great many lilacs about the wings, but they are thickest out by the kitchen.”

The upstairs hall, like the one below, was large and dim, and while we crossed it, my companion called my attention to a loosened board or two in the floor. “The rats are bad,” she observed. “I hope they won’t bother you. They make a good deal of noise at night.” And then almost immediately: “I don’t know how you’ll manage without a bathroom, but Mr. Blanton would never have water put in the house.”

As she spoke, she opened a door at the front and ushered me into an immense bedroom, which was hung in a last-century fashion with faded calico. So far as I could distinguish in the dim light, there was not so much as a touch of red in the room. The furniture was all of rich old mahogany, made in too heavy a style for the taste that has been formed on Chippendale or Sheraton, and much of it looked as if it were dropping to pieces for lack of proper care. There was a high-tester bed, hung with the dingy calico; there was an elaborately carved bureau, with a greenish mirror which reflected my features in a fog; and there was a huge screen, papered in a design of castles and peacocks, which concealed an old-fashioned washstand. Yes, it was primitive. The touch about the water belonged to the dark ages; and yet the place possessed, for me at least, an inexpressible charm.

When Mrs. Blanton had left me alone, after telling me that supper would be served in half an hour, I made a few hurried preparations, while I tried in vain to get a glimpse of myself in the mirror, where my reflection floated like a leaf in a lily pond. Then, stealing cautiously from the room and across the deserted hall, with its musty smell of old spices, I crept down the staircase and out of the open back door. Here that provocative fragrance, the aroma of vanished springs, seized me again; and running down the worn steps of the porch, I passed the bower of lilacs beside the whitewashed kitchen wall, and followed the flagged walk to the sunken garden.

At the end of the walk a primitive wooden stile, like an illustration in Mother Goose, led into the garden; and when I passed it, I found myself in a flowery space, which was surrounded by banks of honeysuckle instead of a wall. A few old fruit trees, now well past blooming, stood in the centre; and edging the grassy paths, there were all the shrubs with quaint-sounding names of which I had dreamed in my childhood—guelder rose, bridal wreath, mock orange, flowering quince, and caly-canthus. Over all there hung a mist which had floated up from the low ground by the river; and it seemed to me that this moisture released the scents of a hundred springs. Never until that moment had I known what the rapture of smell could be.

And the starry profusion of the narcissi! From bank to bank of honeysuckle the garden looked as if the Milky Way had fallen over it and been caught in the high grass.

Suddenly, in that enchanted silence, I heard the sound of a bell. In a house where there were no bathrooms, I surmised that bells were probably still rung for meals; and turning reluctantly, I started back to the stile. I had gone but a step or two when a light flashing through the windows of the house arrested my gaze; and the next instant, when I glanced round again, I saw the figure of the old negress, in her white apron and red turban, standing motionless under the boughs of a pear-tree. In the twilight I saw her eyes fixed upon me, as I had seen them at sunset, with a look of entreaty like the inarticulate appeal in the eyes of the dumb. While I returned her gaze I felt, as I had felt at our first meeting, that she was speaking to me in some inaudible language which I did not yet understand, that she bore a message to me which, sooner or later, she would find a way to deliver. What could she mean? Why had she sought out me, a stranger, when she appeared to avoid the family and even the servants? Quickening my steps, I hastened toward her with a question on my lips; but before I reached her the bell rang again with a chiming sound, and when I withdrew my eyes from the old woman’s face, I noticed that the little boy was running down the flagged walk to the stile. Bitterly I regretted the moment’s inadvertence, for when I looked back, the negress had slipped beyond some of the flowering shrubs, and the garden appeared to be deserted. Well, next time I would be more careful, I resolved. And with this resolution in my mind, I hurried to meet Pell at the stile.

“She says you must come to supper,” began the boy as soon as I came within reach of his voice. It was the first time I had heard him allude to his stepmother, and never, during the week I spent at Whispering Leaves, did he speak of her, in my presence, by any more intimate name.

I held out my arms, and he came to me shyly but trustingly. Though I could see that he was a nervous and sensitive child, the victim, I fancied, of an excitable imagination, I felt that it would not be difficult to win his confidence, if only one started about it in the right way. For the first time in my life I was drawn to a child, and I knew that the boy returned my liking in spite of his reserved manner.

“It is so beautiful I hate to go in,” I said, with my arm about him.

“I wish I could never go in,” he answered, turning back to the garden. “It is so lonely inside the house.”

“Lonely?” I repeated, for the word struck me as a queer one for a child to use. “Aren’t your little brothers and sisters there to play with you?” He shook his head impatiently. “But they don’t like Mammy to come in.”

As I glanced down at his grave little face I wondered if he could be not quite right in his mind? Beneath his vivid hair, his wide-set greenish-blue eyes held a burning ardour that was unusual in so young a child. I could see that he was delicate in frame, and I inferred that his intelligence was dangerously advanced for his years.

“Do you come to the table?” I asked.

He nodded with uncanny glee. “Ever since I was four years old. I had a high chair then. Bobbie uses it now.”

“Is Bobbie one of the twins?”

“One of the littlest twins. Janie is the other. Jack and Gerty, they are the big ones.” Then he laughed slyly. “I’m glad I’m not a twin! I’d hate to have a girl tagging round after me.”

We had reached the back steps, and I turned, before going in, to have a last look at the garden.

The twilight was the colour of white grapes, and the wisp of moon was scarcely more than a thread in the paling sky. Above the kitchen roof there was a flight of bats. An instant later I asked myself if I were dreaming, or if I actually saw the glimmer of the old negress’s apron by the stile. Then the boy waved his arm in an affectionate good-night, and I knew that my imagination had not played a trick on me.

“Who is it, Pell?” I asked.

He glanced at me with his unchildish mirth. “Don’t you see her at the stile over yonder?”

“The old coloured woman? Yes. I’ve seen her twice before. Who is she?”

Again he laughed. For some indefinable reason the laugh grated on my nerves. “If I tell you, will you promise not to let them know?”

I pressed his thin little body to my heart. “I’ll never repeat anything you ask me not to, Pell.” His hand, so like a bird’s claw, went up to my cheek with a caress; and he was on the point of replying when a step sounded in the hall, and one of the white servants came out on the porch to remind us that Mr. Blanton was waiting. To keep Cousin Pelham waiting for his meals was, I soon discovered, an unforgivable offence.

In the dining room, which was lighted by tallow candles, I found an obviously exasperated host and hostess. When I entered Cousin Pelham was fussing about a mahogany cellaret, while Mrs. Blanton was pinning a bib of checked gingham round the neck of a little girl in a high chair. With my English ideas of bringing up children, I thought it an odd custom to have the row of high chairs and trays at the table, and to allow such mere babies to appear at the evening meal.

“This is Gertrude,” said Mrs. Blanton, after my apologies had been contritely offered and graciously accepted by Cousin Pelham, “and that,” nodding to a little boy of the same age, “is John. The other two are Robert and Jane.” They were robust, healthy-looking children, with dark hair and high colour, as unlike their delicate half-brother as one could well imagine.

At supper there was little conversation, for Cousin Pelham, who, I surmised, could talk delightfully when he made the effort, appeared to be absorbed in the food that was placed before him. This was of excellent quality. Evidently, I decided, the second Mrs. Blanton was the right wife for him. Vain, spoiled, selfish, amiable as long as he was given everything that he wanted, and still good-looking in an obvious and somewhat flashing style, he had long ago passed into that tranquil state of mind which follows a complete surrender to the habits of life. I wondered how that first wife, Clarissa of the romantic name and the flaming hair, had endured existence in this lonely neighbourhood with the companionship of a man who thought of nothing but food and drink. Perhaps he was different then; and yet was it possible for such abnormal egoism to develop in the years since her death? He ate immoderately, I observed, and even before he left the table I could see that the drowsiness which afflicts the overfed was descending upon him.

“The garden is charming,” I said. “I have never seen one like it, so irregular and apparently neglected, and yet with a formal soul of its own.” Cousin Pelham stared at me over the dish of fried chicken from which he was carefully selecting the brownest and tenderest piece. “The garden? Oh, yes, we’ve had to let that go. It was kept up as long as Clarissa lived. She had a passion for flowers; but we can’t get any of the darkeys to work it now.” Then he appealed directly to his wife, who was engaged in teaching Gertrude how to hold her fork properly. “There hasn’t been a spade stuck in the garden this spring, has there, Hannah?”

Mrs. Blanton shook her head, without removing her eyes from the little girl. “Nor last spring, nor the one before that,” she rejoined. “Nobody sets foot in it now except Pell, and he oughtn’t to go there. I tell him there might be snakes in the long grass; but he won’t mind what I say. It takes as much work as we can manage to plough the fields and the kitchen beds. We can’t spare any for that old garden you have to spade.”

“Perhaps that’s a part of the charm,” I responded. “It expresses itself, not some human being’s idea of planting.”

She looked at me as if she did not know what I meant, and on my other side Cousin Pelham chuckled softly. “That sounds like Clarissa,” he said, and there was no trace of sadness in his voice.

Across the table little Pell was eating delicately, pretending to be a bird. Now and then his stepmother turned away from the younger children to scold him about his fastidious appetite, or his odd manner of using his knife and fork, as if they were a superior kind of chopsticks. Her tone was not harsh. It was no sharper indeed than the one she used to her own children; yet, whenever she spoke to him, I felt rather than saw that he winced and shrank away from her. The child’s nerves were overstrung, I could tell that just by watching him with his stepmother; and to her, who could see nothing that was not directly before her eyes, his sensitiveness appeared deliberate perversity. Yet he was an attractive child in spite of his elfin ways. If he could only find the sympathy and understanding he needed so desperately, I felt that he might become very lovable.

Though I was sorry for the child then, I had barely touched the edge of the passion which presently filled my heart. The hardest hour of all, and one of the most trying moments in my life, came when we passed into the library, and Mrs. Blanton summoned the children to bed. The younger children, already nodding, obeyed without protest; but when it came to Pell’s turn to kiss his father good-night, he began to shake and whimper with terror. For a minute I did not understand; then turning to Cousin Pelham, I asked, with a sympathy so acute that it stabbed like a knife,

“Is Pell afraid of the dark?”

Cousin Pelham, sunk in the softest old leather chair, was beyond the sound of my voice; but his wife answered immediately in her firm and competent tone.

“We are trying to break him of it. It would be dreadful for his father’s son to be a coward.”

“Does he sleep in the nursery?”

“He used to, but we had to move his bed across the hall because he kept the other children awake. He gets, or pretends to get, the most ridiculous notions into his head, and he carries on so that the other children don’t get any sleep when they are in the room with him.”

“Where does he stay now?”

“In the spare room next to yours. We moved him there a few weeks ago, and you would think from the way he behaved that we were sending him to his grave.”

“But doesn’t that seem the wrong way, to frighten a nervous child into hysterics?”

At this she turned on me the most exasperating force in the universe, impregnable common sense.

“We’ve got to break him of it,” she retorted, “or he will be a baby all his life.”

“I think you’re wrong,” was all I could say feebly in denial; and my words had as little effect as the dash of hail on a window-pane. But, while I answered, I was telling myself that I had found out where the boy slept, and that I would go to his room as soon as I had bidden the family goodnight. Cousin Pelham and his wife stayed downstairs, I knew, in what they called “the chamber” behind the drawing room, so I should have to guard against only the stupid-looking nurse who had a room, I supposed, near the children.

Bending over, I pressed the boy to my heart. “I am near you, and I will take care of you,” I whispered. Then, releasing him, I stood back and watched him walk, wincing and trembling, after the sturdy children of his stepmother.

It seemed to me that the evening would never end. Every minute I was straining my ears for a sound from the floor above, while Cousin Pelham dozed through the processes of digestion, and Mrs. Blanton and I discussed such concrete facts as wood and stones and preserves and the best way to build a road or to cut down a tree. At last, when I was exhausted beyond belief, though it was only a little after nine o’clock, she laid down her mending, rose from her chair, and, with her hand on her husband’s shoulder, wished me good-night.

“You will find a candle in the hall,” she said. “We never use lamps in the chambers.” Her use of the archaic word struck me at the time as poetic. It was the only poetic touch I ever observed about her.

On a table in the hall I found a row of tallow dips in old brass candlesticks; and after lighting one, I took it in my hand and ascended the circular staircase. Ahead of me the light flitted like a moth up the worn steps, which the feet of generations had hollowed out in the centre as water hollows out a stairway of rock. The hall above was empty—it occurred to me at the moment that I had never seen such empty-looking halls—and was quite dark except for the flickering light of my candle. As I crossed the floor the green mist which I had left in the garden floated in and enveloped me, and that wistful fragrance became intolerably sweet. I had suddenly the feeling that the dim corners and winding recesses of the hall were crowded with intangible shapes.

After glancing through my open door to assure myself that I had not made a mistake, I stole across the hall and hesitated before the threshold of what Mrs. Blanton had pointed out to me as “the spare room.” If the child were sleeping, I did not wish to arouse him, but all idea that he slept was banished as I pushed the door wider and heard him talking aloud to himself. Then, while the pointed flame of my candle pierced the obscurity, I saw that he was not, as I had first thought, alone. The old coloured woman in the black alpaca dress, with the white apron and the red turban, was bending over him. When I approached she turned slowly and looked at me; and I felt that her dark, compassionate face was love made manifest to my eyes. So she had looked down on the child, and so, for one miraculous instant, she gazed directly into my heart. For one miraculous instant! Then, while I stood there, transfixed as by an arrow, she passed, with that slow movement, across the room to the door which I had left open. Before I could stir, before I could utter a word to detain her, she had disappeared; and the boy, sitting up in the heavily draped bed, was staring at me with wondering eyes. “Mammy was telling me a story,” he said.

“I didn’t know that you had a mammy now.” This was the best that I could do at the moment.

“Oh, yes, I have!” He smiled with charming archness, and I noticed that the fear had passed out of his voice.

“When did she come?” I asked.

“She has been here always, ever since,” he hesitated, “since before I was.”

“Does she look after the other children too?”

He laughed, cuddling down into the middle of the feather bed. “They don’t know about her. They have never seen her.”

“But how can she come and go in the house without anybody seeing her?”

At this the laughter stopped. “She has a way,” he answered enigmatically. “She never comes into the house except when I’m afraid.”

I bent over and kissed him. “Well, you’re not frightened any longer?”

“Oh, no. I’m all right now,” he replied, stroking my hand. “The next time it gets dark Mammy says she will come back and finish her story.”

“And I am next door,” I said. “Whenever you begin to feel frightened you can come and sleep on the big couch by the window.”

“By the window,” he repeated eagerly, “where Mammy’s wrens are under the eaves. That would be fun.”

Then, as I arranged the bedclothes over him, he turned his cheek to the pillow, and settled himself for the night. A moment later, when I went out of the room, I began wondering again about the old negress. Was she a faithful servant who had sacrificed her superstition to her affection for Clarissa’s child, and had stayed on at Whispering Leaves when the other negroes had gone away? In the morning I would make some inquiries. Meanwhile I liked to remember the glory—there is no other word to describe it—that I had seen in her dark face when she bent over the boy.

In the morning, when I came out of doors, it was into a world of maize-coloured sunshine. There was new green on the cedars, and the little blue flowers in the grass looked as formal as the blossoms in a Gothic tapestry. Suddenly a harsh scream sounded a little way to the right, and a peacock, with flaunting plumage, marched across the lawn, through the sunlight and shadow. As I stood there, entranced by the colour of the morning, it seemed to me that this circle of sunlight and shadow became alive with the quiver of innumerable gauzy wings, the bright ghosts of all the birds that had ever sung in this place.

When, presently, I turned in the direction of the garden, I saw that Pell was playing in a row of flowering quince near the stile. He was on his knees, building a castle of rocks, which he had brought in a little wagon from the road in the pasture; and while I approached, I observed that he was talking aloud to himself as children talk in their play. Then, before I reached him, I found my gaze arrested by a glimmer of red amid the smoke-gray boughs of a crÊpe myrtle tree; and it seemed to my startled fancy that I made out the figure of the old negress. But the next minute a scarlet tanager flashed out of the branches, and the image proved to be one of those grotesque shapes which crÊpe myrtle bushes, like ancient olive trees, frequently assume.

The child was playing happily by himself.

When my shadow fell over him, he looked up with his expression of secret wisdom. Kneeling there, with his red curls and his blue-green eyes enkindled by the sunshine, he reminded me of some unearthly flower of light.

“It will be a fine castle,” I said.

He glanced hastily over his shoulder; and I noticed that his manner was shy and furtive, though it expressed also a childish pleasure that was very appealing.

“I’ve got something better than a castle,” he answered. “I found it yesterday down by the ice pond. Will you promise not to tell if I let you look?”

“I promise,” I assured him gravely; and, with another suspicious glance in the direction of the house, he sprang to his feet and caught me by the hand. Leading me round the shrubbery and over the stile, he showed me a hollow he had made in the tall grasses beneath a cluster of lilac bushes. Lying there on a bed of dry fern I saw a black and white mongrel puppy, a delightful, audacious, independent puppy, half terrier and half unknown, with an engaging personality and a waggish black ear that dropped over one sparkling eye. Fastened securely by a strip of red cotton to the shrub, beside a partly gnawed bone and a saucer of water, he sat surveying me with an expectant, inquisitive look.

“Isn’t he a beauty?” asked Pell, enraptured, as he went down on his knees and flung his arms about the puppy.

“A beauty,” I repeated; and I also went down on my knees to embrace boy and dog.

“He hadn’t had anything to eat for ever so long when I found him. Martha gives me scraps for him, and William lets him sleep in the stable.” Then he looked straight into my eyes. “You won’t tell?” he pleaded. “She wouldn’t let him stay if she knew. She doesn’t like dogs.”

Of course she didn’t like dogs. Hadn’t I felt from the first that she wouldn’t? Why, there wasn’t a dog on the place, except the two black and yellow hounds I had seen half a mile away in the cornfield, and they belonged doubtless to one of the negroes.

“No, I won’t tell,” I promised. “I’ll help you take care of him.”

His eyes shone. “Can you teach him to do tricks? He knows how to beg already. Mammy taught him.”

I released the child quickly and rose to my feet. “Where is your Mammy, Pell?”

His rapid glance flew down the garden walk, and across the narcissi, to the twisted pear tree. “She’s just gone,” he answered. “She went when she saw you coming.”

“Where does she live?”

At this he broke into a laugh. “Oh, she lives away, way over yonder,” he responded, with a sweep of his hand.

For the next week Pell and I were cheerful conspirators. When I look back on it now, after so many years, I can still recall those cautious trips to the barn or the little bed of ferns under the lilacs. We fed Wop, that was the name we chose at last, until he grew as round as a ball; and he was just passing into the second stage of his education when Mrs. Blanton discovered his presence, as I was sure that she would be obliged to do sooner or later.

I had been away for the afternoon to visit some relatives at a distance; and as we drove home about sunset, we passed on the road the old coloured woman whom Pell had called Mammy. I could not be mistaken, I told myself. I should have recognized her anywhere, not only by the quaint turban she wore bound about her head, but by that indescribable light which shone in her face.

At the time we were driving through a stretch of burned pines, and when I first noticed her she had stopped to rest and was sitting on a charred stump by the roadside, with the red disc of the sun at her back. The light was in my eyes; but, as I leaned out and smiled at her, she gave me again that long deep look so filled with inarticulate yearning. I knew then, as I had known the first afternoon, that she was trying to make me understand, that she was charged with some message she could not utter. While her eyes met mine I was smitten—that is the only word for the sensation—into silence; but after we had driven on, I recovered myself sufficiently to say to the cousin who was taking me home:

“If she is going a long way, don’t you think we might give her a lift?”

My cousin, an obtuse young man, gazed at me vacantly. “If who is going a long way?”

“The old coloured woman by the roadside. Didn’t you see her?”

He shook his head. “No, I wasn’t looking. I didn’t see anybody.”

While he was still speaking, I leaned out with an exclamation of surprise. “Why, there she is now in front of us! She must have run ahead of us through the pines. She is waiting by the dead tree at the fork of the road.”

My cousin was laughing now. “The sunset makes you see double. There isn’t anybody there. Can you see anything except the blasted oak at the fork of the road, Jacob?”

A few minutes later, when we reached the place where the road branched, I saw that it was deserted. The red blaze of the sun could play tricks with one’s vision, I knew; but it was odd that on both occasions, at precisely the same hour, I should be visited by this hallucination. That it was an hallucination, I no longer doubted when, looking up a short while afterward, I saw again the old woman’s figure ahead of me. This time, however, I kept silent, for the first thing one learns from such visitations is the danger of talking to people of things which they cannot understand. But I drove on with my heart in my throat. In front of me in the blue air was that vision; and in my mind there was a voiceless apprehension. Then, as we reached the lawn, the old woman vanished, and a moment later the sound of a child’s crying fell on my ears.

Alone on the front steps. Pell sat weeping inconsolably, with his face hidden in his thin little hands. When I sprang from the carriage, he rushed into my arms.

“She has sent him away! She has sent him away to be drowned!” he cried in a heartbreaking voice.

As I drew him close, the door opened, and Mrs. Blanton looked out.

“Come in, Pell,” she called, not unkindly, but unseeingly. “You will fret yourself into a fever. The circus is coming next week, and if you make yourself sick, you won’t be able to go to it.”

At this Pell turned on her a white and quivering face. “I don’t want to go to the circus,” he said. “I don’t want any supper. I want Wop, and I wish you were dead!”

“Pell, dear!” I cried, but Mrs. Blanton only laughed good-naturedly, a laugh that was as common as her features.

“He’s got his mother’s temper all right,” she remarked to me over the child’s head. “If you don’t want any supper,” she added, dragging him indoors, while he struggled to free himself from the grasp of her large firm hand which seemed as inexorable as her purpose, “you must go straight upstairs to bed.”

When we had entered the house the boy broke away from her, and marched, without a tremor of hesitation, across the hall and into the thick dusk of the staircase.

“Let me go after him,” I said. “He is so afraid of the dark, and the candles are not lighted upstairs.”

Mrs. Blanton detained me by a gesture. “He is the sort of child you have to be firm with,” she returned, and then immediately, “Mr. Blanton”—she always addressed her husband as “Mr. Blanton”—“is waiting for us in the dining room. It frets him to be kept waiting.”

After this there was nothing to do but follow her, with a heavy heart, into the room, where Cousin Pelham stood, ponderously frowning at the door. I could not this evening meet his annoyance with my usual playful apology; and a little later, when the excellent supper was served, I found that I was unable to swallow a morsel. The fact that I was leaving the next day, that I should, perhaps, not see Pell again for years, had turned my heart to lead.

When supper was over I escaped as soon as I could and ran upstairs to the room where Pell slept. A candle was burning by his bed, and to my amazement the child was sleeping peacefully, with a smile on his face where the traces of tears were scarcely dried. While I looked down on him, he stirred and opened his eyes.

“I thought you were Mammy,” he murmured, with a drowsy laugh.

“Has Mammy been here?” I asked.

He was so sleepy that he could barely answer; but, as he nestled down into the middle of the feather bed, he replied without the faintest sign of his recent distress:

“She was here when I came up. She told me it was all right about Wop. Uncle Moab is keeping him for me.”

“Uncle Moab is keeping him?” I pressed my hand on his forehead under the vivid hair; but there was no hint of fever.

“She says she gave Wop to Uncle Moab. Mammy wouldn’t let anybody hurt him.”

Then his eyes closed while the smile quivered on his lips. “Mammy says you must take me with you when you go away,” he murmured. His face changed to an almost unearthly loveliness, and before I could answer, before I could even take in the words he had spoken, he had fallen asleep.

For a minute I stood looking down on him. Then leaving the candle still burning, I went out, closing the door softly, and ran against the maid, a young Irish woman, whose face I liked.

“I was just going to see if Pell had fallen asleep,” she explained a little nervously. “I have a message for him. You won’t tell Mrs. Blanton I brought it?”

“No. I won’t tell Mrs. Blanton.”

For an instant the girl hesitated. “She is so strict,” she blurted out, and then more guardedly, “William wouldn’t have drowned the child’s puppy. He just took it away and gave it to Uncle Moab who was going along the road.”

“I am glad,” I said eagerly. “Uncle Moab will look after it?”

“He sent Pell a message not to worry. I was going in to tell him.”

“But he knows it already,” I replied indiscreetly. “Somebody told him.”

A puzzled look came into her face. “But nobody knew. William just came back a minute ago, and there hasn’t been another soul on the place this afternoon.”

I saw my slip at once and hastened to remedy it. “Then I was mistaken of course. The child must have imagined it.”

“Yes, he does imagine things,” she responded readily; and after a word of good-night, she turned back to the stairs while I crossed the hall to my room.

There, as soon as I had closed the door, I put down my candle, and turned to the open window to think over what I had heard. There was nothing really strange, I told myself, in the incident of the puppy and Uncle Moab. It was natural enough that William should have refused to obey an order he thought cruel; it was natural enough also that Uncle Moab should have been going by in the road at that hour. Everything was easily explained except the singular change in the child, and the happy smile on his little tear-stained face when he murmured, “Mammy says you must take me with you when you go away.” Over and over again I heard those words as I sat there by the window. So insistent was the repetition that I might have deluded myself into the belief that they were spoken aloud in the darkness outside. How could I take the child away with me? I asked at last, as if I were disputing with some invisible presence at my side. What room was there for a child in my active life? I loved Pell; I hated to leave him; but how could I possibly take him with me when I went away in the morning? Yet, even after I had undressed, climbed into the canopied bed, and blown out my candle, I still heard that phrase again and again in my mind. I was still hearing it hours afterward when I fell asleep and dreamed of the old coloured woman sitting on the charred stump by the roadside.

Dreams. The old coloured woman by the roadside. The song of far-off birds coming nearer. The jade-green mist of the twilight changing suddenly to opal. Light growing out of darkness. Light turning from clear gold to flame colour. Still the song of birds that became so loud it was like the torrent of waters—or of fire. Dreams. Dreams. Nothing more....

Starting awake, I was aware first of that opal-coloured light; then of the fact that I was stifling, that a gray cloud had swept in from the open window, or the open door, and enveloped me. The next instant, with a cry, I sprang up and caught at the dressing-gown on a chair by my bed. From outside, mingled with that dream of singing birds and rushing torrents, the sound of voices was reaching me. The words I could not hear, but I needed no words to tell me that these were voices of warning. Whispering Leaves was burning while I dreamed. Whispering Leaves was burning, and I must fight my way to safety through the smoke that rushed in at my open door!

“Pell!” I called in terror, as I ran out into the hall. But there was no answer to my cry, and the next minute, when I looked into the child’s room, I saw that the bed was empty. They had saved him and forgotten me. Well, at least they had saved him!

Of the next few minutes, which seemed an eternity of terror, I can recall nothing now except a struggle for air. I must have fought my way through the smoke upstairs. I must have passed that savage light so close that it scorched my face, which was blistered afterward, though I felt no pain at the moment. I must have heard that rush of flames so near that it deafened me; but of this I can remember nothing to-day. Yet I can still feel the air blowing in my face on the lawn outside. I can still see the little green leaves on the cedars standing out illuminated in that terrible glow. I can still hear the cry that rang out:

“Pell! Where is Pell? Didn’t you bring Pell with you?”

Fifteen years ago. Fire and ashes, pain and happiness, have passed and are forgotten; but that question, as I heard it then, still sounds in my ears.

“Where is Pell? Didn’t you bring Pell with you?”

“I thought he was safe,” my voice was so thick that the words were scarcely articulate. “His room was empty.”

“He isn’t with the other children. We thought he had gone to you.” The speaker I have forgotten—Cousin Pelham or his wife, or the nurse, it is no matter—but the words are still living.

“I will go back.” This was Cousin Pelham, I knew, for he had turned to enter the burning house.

“It is too late now.” This was not one, but several voices together. As they spoke the windows of the house shone like the sunrise while a torrent of flame swept through the hall.

“Oh, Pell! Pell!” I cried out in agony. “Cannot you come to me?”

For a minute—it was scarcely longer—after I called, there was no answer. We stood in that red glare, and round us and beyond us closed the mysterious penumbra of the darkness. Without the circle, where we clung together in our horror, there was the freshness and the sweetness of the spring, and all the little quiet stirs that birds make when they nest at night. And it was out of this bird-haunted darkness that a shape moved suddenly past me into the flames, a shape which as the light edged it round I saw to be that of the old negress.

“She is looking for him,” I cried now. “Oh, don’t you see her?”

They gathered anxiously round me. “The fire has blinded her,” I heard them say. “She is looking straight at the flames.”

Yes, I was looking straight at the flames, for beyond the flames, past the unburned wing of the house, from the window of an old storeroom, which was never opened, they had told me, I saw the shape of the old negress pass again like a shadow. The next instant my heart melted with joy, for I saw that she was bringing the child in her arms. The little face was pale as death; the red curls were singed to black; but it was the child that she held. Even the unperceiving eyes about me, though they could see only material things, knew that Pell had come unharmed out of the fire. To them it was merely a shadow, a veil of smoke, which surrounded him. I alone saw the dark arms that enfolded him. I alone, among all those standing there in that awful light, recognized that dark compassionate face.

Her eyes found me at last, and I knew, in that moment of vision, what the message was that she had for me. Without a word I stepped forward, and held out my arms. As I did so, I saw a glory break in the dim features. Then, even while I gave my voiceless answer, the face melted from me into spirals of smoke. Was it a dream, after all? Was the only reality the fact that I held the child safe and unharmed in my arms?