Looking down at the ditch, she saw the half-concealed form of a man lying in the water, with his head and arms resting upon the bank. A tragedy of dry mud stamped its grey mosaic over his face. His blonde hair drooped with dirt like a trampled sunflower. The Pierrot-like hesitation of his features peeped beneath the dirt--a still and frightened ritual. With the horror of one who believes that she is beholding a dead man, Harriet knelt beside the figure and shook its head, her face turned away and her eyes tightly closed. Then she heard a mingled rustle and splash and saw that the man was rising to his feet. He stood with bent knees over the mud of the ditch, his black clothes garlanded with slime, his face twitching into life beneath its stiff mask of earth. With a squeal of fright she scrambled to her feet and ran down the road. The man in the ditch, Carl Felman, felt that something was still evading him and once more experienced the hunter’s frenzy that had tumbled him over the night. Gripped by a superhuman agility, he transcended his stiff joints and pursued her down the road. He caught her, his hands dropping upon her shoulders and whirling her around. She faced him with uplifted arms, a turbulence of fright and curiosity swiftly toying with her eyes and mouth. He lowered his hands and stood limply before her. “Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in an almost indistinct voice. She stared and did not answer. “Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in a softly clear voice. A look of loose wonder came to her face. “Do you know what grief is?” he asked, in an almost loud voice. A darkly smiling contemplation revised the lines of her face. “Yes,” she whispered. Without another word they both walked down the country road together. PART III INSTIGATION Instigation CHAPTER XVI. The train in which Carl was riding rolled slowly through the outskirts of a southern city and he looked out at the rows of negro cottages and hovels that plaintively cringed underneath the wide foliage of willow and magnolia trees. Most of the cottages were unpainted and grey with the impersonally chaste kiss of time, while the hovels were mere flimsy boxes covered with black tar paper. Sunflowers and morning glories stood amid the weeds and twined about the slanting fences like gaudy virgins dismayed at their sight of a lewdly disordered room and appealing to the sunlight for protection. Negro women in faded sunbonnets and wrappers could sometimes be seen shuffling down the thickly dusty roads and negro children, in weird incoherences of tattered clothes, tumbled around the humble doorsteps. The children were little black madmen unconsciously dodging a huge fist that was concealed beneath the scene. The dust of a late August morning had dropped upon all things, sifting its listless sadness into every crevice and crack, and even the fierce sun could not dispel this invasion.