“Oh, Ton’!” she called, softly. He had to look at her, and even the cold exhalations of the night light could not kill the color sweeping her cheeks. He became aware of her hand reaching out to him, wavering close before him; heedless of all things else, earthly and unearthly, he took it in his own and turned it over and kissed the palm--kissed it over and over again till it smothered him. “Mamie!” he cried, searching her face with his reckless eyes. “You’re mine, ain’t you, Mame? Ain’t you?” He came nearer and stood on tiptoe to draw down her lips, but she went white at that and pulled back, fluttering her free hand over her bosom. “Ton’--Ton’! Don’t! I--I ain’t--smart--Tony.” He stood perfectly quiet for a moment, as it stuck there in stone by a flash of some Medusa-head. After a time, becoming aware that he still held the girl’s hand in his, he let it drop abruptly. He began working his lips, as if they were stiff from long disuse. His face was yellow and hard. “The hell you say!” Turning away, he walked around the corner of the house, a singular woodenness in his knees. But he returned immediately to lean against the upright and confront her with his blighted rancor. “You didn’t waste no time, did you?” She did not appear to have grasped it yet. Once again he flung off around the corner, and this time he did not return. When he came into his own lane, gated with clumpy willows and at the further end fading out into the blue-white slope of a dune dotted with rubbish, he saw that the news had run ahead of him and all the neighborhood was out of doors in the dusty thoroughfare, shouting, sobbing, squealing. His mother lunged forward at sight of him, an old, ragged-haired woman, full of fecund years, tripping over the torn hem of her skirt. Va Di glowered at her, holding her off with his strong hands. She had been handsome once too; even now there were fine foundation-lines which the folds of her cheeks, red and rutted like a rooster’s wattles, could not altogether hide. “Ma!” he cried, of a sudden. “Ma, I’m back.” Folding her in his arms, he patted her back with a rough tenderness, and wept. Then all the others, who had come pattering, fell to weeping and screeching and pounding _him_ on the back. They got, finally, into the house, a bleak, tall, narrow structure with peeling clapboards without and a pervasion of linoleum within; into the kitchen, full of all the essentials of life, a stove, a pump, a lithograph of the Virgin, a mahogany wardrobe leaking cornmeal and onions, a phonograph, cot-bed, chairs, and a table. Eight brothers and sisters had to be heard; a ninth came running from her husband’s house up-street, her stolid velocity not in the least hampered by the protuberance under her shawl, understood to be a nursing infant, miraculously adhesive. “You’ll git the house painted,” she murmured, with a hint of severity, to Angelina, seventeen, and in high school. “Yeh.” Angelina had thought of that herself, having callers.