“Miss Pinckney,” said Phyl that night as they sat at supper, “when you left me this afternoon in Juliet’s room I stopped to look at the books and things and when I opened the bureau I touched a spring by accident and a little panel fell out and I found a lot of old letters behind it. It was wrong of me to go meddling about and I thought I ought to tell you.”

“Old letters,” said Miss Pinckney, “you don’t say—what were they about?”

“I read one or two,” said the girl. “I’d never, never have dreamed of touching them only—only they were hers—they were to him.”

“Rupert?”

“Yes.”

“Love letters?”

“Yes.”

Miss Pinckney sighed.

“He kept all her letters,” said she, “and they came back to her after he was killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war; they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she—well, well, it’s all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that those letters should have fallen into your hands.”

“Why, strange?”

“Why?” burst out Miss Pinckney. “Why I have dusted that old bureau inside and out a hundred times, and pulled out the drawers and pushed them in and it never shewed sign of having anything in it but emptiness, and you don’t do more’n look at it and you find those letters. It’s just as if the thing had deceived me. I don’t mind, and I don’t want to see them, they weren’t intended for other eyes than his and hers—and maybe yours since they were shewn you like that.”

“Was it wrong of me to look at them?” asked Phyl. “I never would have done it only—only—Oh, I don’t know, I somehow felt she wouldn’t mind. She seemed like a sister—I would never dream of looking at another person’s letters but she did not seem like another person. I can’t explain. It was just as though the letters were my own—just exactly as though they were my own when I found them in my hands.”

Phyl was talking with her eyes fixed before her as though she were looking across some great distance.

Miss Pinckney gave a little shiver, then supper being over she rose from the table and led the way from the room.

Richard Pinckney had dined with them but he was out for supper somewhere or another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for more than a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced.

The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call in like this without ceremony; Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckney about some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had not been five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to look at her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, the red headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances’ type dread red haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as her own property to be protected against all comers.

All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful and armed.

Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney’s dispraise of her, was a most formidable person as far as the opposite sex was concerned. One of the women of whom other women say, “Well, I don’t know what he sees in her, I’m sure.”

A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, full curved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of the world and the flesh—with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansy blue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black.

“Well, I’ll subscribe ten dollars,” said Miss Pinckney; “I reckon the darkie babies won’t be any the worse for a crÊche and maybe not very much better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil good manners and respect for their betters into their heads I’d give you forty. I’m sure I don’t know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to, one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk the other day, bag of impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery leery what-d’-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces s’nough to raise Cain in any one’s heart.”

“I know,” replied the dark girl, “and they are getting worse; the whip is the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists.”

“Don’t call them my beautiful Abolitionists,” replied the other. “I didn’t make ’em. All the same I don’t believe in whipping and never did. It’s the whip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk like Christians slavery would have been the greatest god-send to blacks. It was what stays are to women. But they didn’t. The low down white made slavery impossible with his whipping and oppression and we had to suffer. Well, we haven’t ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying like rabbits there’s no knowing what we’ve got to suffer yet.”

Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. “Now, that girl,” said the elder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, “is just the type of the people I was telling her about. No idea but whipping. She wouldn’t have much mercy on a human creature black or tan or white. Thick skinned. She didn’t even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what brought her here this hour with her crÊche. It’s just a fad. If they got up a charity to make alligator bait of the black babies so’s to sell the alligator skins to buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it’d be all the same to her. Something to gad about with. I wish I’d kept that ten dollars in my pocket.”

Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night—before ten—and Phyl, who was free to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching the moon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a plan that had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckney for bed.

She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dial becoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mystery which is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn.

Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of the northern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at times and in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one is walking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed lit by a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would never lose the charm of dawn.

Yet the garden to which she would now turn her eyes shewed nothing of this. Night reigned there from the cherokee roses moving in the wind to the carnations motionless, moon stricken, deathly white.

Sure that Miss Pinckney would not come down again, Phyl rose and crossed the garden towards the gate.

She wanted to see if the trysting place behind the magnolia and the bushes that grew about it were still there.

At the gate she paused for a moment, glancing back at the house as Juliet Mascarene might have done on those evenings when she had an appointment with her lover. Then, pushing through the bushes and past the magnolia trees she found herself in a little half moonlit space, a natural arbour through whose roof of leaves the moonlight came in quavering shafts. She stood for a moment absolutely still whilst her eyes accustomed themselves to the light. Then she began to search for the seat she guessed to be there, and found it. It was between an oak bole and the wall of the garden, and the bushes behind had grown so that their branches half covered it. Neglected, forsaken, unknown, perhaps, to the people now living in Vernons it had lingered with the fidelity of inanimate things, protected by the foliage of the southern garden from prying eyes.

She pushed back the leaves and branches and bent them out of the way, then she took her seat, and as she did so several of the bent branches released themselves and closed half round her in a delightful embrace.

From here she could see brokenly the garden and the walk leading from the gate, with the light of the moon now strong upon the walk. The night sounds of the street just beyond the wall came mixed with the stir of foliage as the wind from the sea pressed over the trees like the hand of a mesmerist inducing sleep.

So it was here that Juliet Mascarene had sat with Rupert Pinckney on those summer nights when the world was younger, before the war. The war that had changed everything whilst leaving the roses untouched and the moonlight the same on the bird-haunted garden of Vernons.

Everything was the same here in this little space of flowers and trees. But the lovers had vanished.

“For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain.” The words strayed across Phyl’s mind brought up by recollection. “He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

The trees seemed whispering it, the eternal statement that leaves the eternal question unanswered.

The garden was talking to her, the night, the very bushes that clasped her in a half embrace; perfumes, moonlight, the voice of the wind, all were part of the spell that bound her, held her, whispered to her. It was as though the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in a glass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life.

Vainly, for as she sat watching in imagination the forms of the lost lovers parting there at the gate, suddenly there came upon her a stirring of the soul, a joyous uplifting as though wings had been given to her mind for one wild second raising it to the heights beyond earthly knowledge.

“Love can never die.”

It was as though some ghostly voice had whispered this fact in her ear.

Juliet was not dead nor the man she loved, changed maybe but not dead. In some extraordinary way she knew it as surely as though she herself had once been Juliet.

Religion to Phyl had meant little, the Bible a book of fair promises and appalling threats, vague promises but quite definite threats. As a quite small child she had gathered the impression that she was sure to be damned unless she managed to convert herself into a quite different being from the person she knew herself to be. Death was the supreme bogey, the future life a thing not to be thought of if one wanted to be happy.

Yet now, just as if she had been through it all, the truth came flooding on her like a golden sea, the truth that life never loses touch with life, that the body is only a momentary manifestation of the ever living spirit.

Meeting Street, the old house so full of memories, Juliet’s letters, the garden, they had all been stretching out arms to her, trying to tell her something, whispering, suggesting, and now all these vague voices had become clear, as though strengthened by the moonlight and the mystery of night.

Clear as lip-spoken words came the message:

“You have lived before and we say this to you, we, the things that knew you and loved you in a past life.”

A step that halted outside close to the garden gate broke the spell, the gate turned on its hinges shewing through its trellis work the form of a man. It was Pinckney just returned from some supper-party or club.

Phyl caught her breath back. Suddenly, and at the sight of Pinckney, Prue’s words of that morning entered her mind.

“Miss Julie, Massa Pinckney told me tell yo’ he be at de gate t’night same’s las’ night. Done you let on as I told you.”

And here he was, the man who had been occupying her thoughts and who was beginning to occupy her dreams, and here she was as though waiting for him by appointment.

But there was much more than that. Worlds and worlds more than that, a whole universe of happiness undreamed of.

She rose from the seat and the parted bushes rustled faintly as they closed behind her.

Pinckney, who had just shut the gate, heard the whisper of the leaves, he turned and saw a figure standing half in shadow and half in moonlight. For a moment he was startled, fancying it a stranger, then he saw that it was Phyl.

“Hullo,” said he. “Why, Phyl, what are you doing here?”

The commonplace question shattered everything like a false note in music.

“Nothing,” she answered. Then without a word more she ran past him and vanished into the house.

Pinckney cast the stump of his cigar away.

“What on earth is the matter with her now?” said he to himself. “What on earth have I done?”

The word she had uttered carried half a sob with it, it might have been the last word of a quarrel.

He stood for a moment glancing around. The wild idea had entered his mind that she had been there to meet some one and that his intrusion had put her out.

But there was no one in the garden; nothing but the trees and the flowers, wind shaken and lit by the moon, the same placid moon that had lit the garden of Vernons for the lovers of whom he knew nothing except by hearsay, and for whom he cared nothing at all.