On either hand the perfumed walls came close. Far overhead the trees mingled their leaves and through the lace roof the early light came stilly down. The water was clear brown. Each turn brought a vista, faintly lit, tapering into mist, through which showed like smoked pearl mere shapes of trees. They went on and on, to a low and liquid sound. A white crane stood to watch them, ghostly in its place. Isolation brooded; all was as still as the border of the world. Turning with the turning water they found another reach with pearl grey trees. A boat came toward them out of the mist, a dugout like their own, with a figure, standing, poling. In the greyness and the distance it was not immediately to be made out; then, as the boat came nearer, they saw that it was a woman, and another minute told her name. The young negro broke into a happy babbling. “Miss Désirée ain’ gwine let de river drown her!—no, nurr her mammy, nurr Mingo, nurr Simon, nurr ’Rasmus! She got mo’ sence dan de river. ‘Ho!’ she say, ‘you ol’ river! You can tek my house, but you can’t tek me! I des walk out lak de terrapin an’ leave you de shell!’” She came out of the mist into the morning light, into the emerald and gold. She rowed bareheaded, standing straight, slender, and fine as Artemis. The elder negro dipped the oar strongly, the distance lessened with swiftness. When she saw Edward, she gave the singing cry he knew as though he had known it always.... ’Rasmus’s cabin, it seemed, had been rebuilt. Here were mammy and ’Rasmus himself and Mingo and Simon, and a little bag of meal and a little, little coffee. Everybody had breakfast while the birds sang and the trees waved, and the honey bees were busy with all the flowers of the Southern spring. Later, there was held a council between General Cary and General Gaillard, sitting gravely opposite each other, he on a cypress stump and she on a fallen pine. The Fusilier place? Yes, the servants had best go there. Mammy, at any rate, must go. She was old and feeble, a little childish—and Madam Fusilier was a true saint who gave herself to the servants. Five miles down the road lived an old man who had a mule and a cart. Désirée had an idea that they had not been taken. The Fusilier place was fourteen miles away. They might get mammy there before night. “And you?” “I will take her there, of course.” “Madam Fusilier will insist upon caring for you, too.” “Undoubtedly. But I do not wish to stay at the Fusilier place. It is in the back country. News never comes there. You could not hear even the firing on the river. It is a cloister, and she is old and always on her knees. I would beat against the cage until I died or beat it down.” “Désirée, would you come with me? We could marry at Natchez, and the women are not leaving Vicksburg.... Oh, I cannot tell if I am giving you good counsel!” “It is a counsel of happiness.”