She cocked her head on one side with her turtle-like motion. "Why should she not sing?" she asked in her thick, sweet voice. She had never learned the difference between the pronouns. "She's be'n gatherin' yarbs in the wood, an' th' sun is warm," she blinked at it rapidly, "an' the winter it is pas', Marse Natty, no mo' winter!" Nathaniel came close up to her, laying his thin fingers on her fat, black arm. His voice quivered. "But they say if you love those things and if they make you glad you are damned to everlasting brimstone fire. Tell me how you dare to laugh, so that I will dare too." The old woman laughed, opening her mouth so widely that the red lining to her throat showed moistly, and all her fat shook on her bones. "Lord love ye, chile, dat's white folks' talk. Dat don't scare a old black woman!" She shifted her basket to the other arm and prepared to go on. "You're bleeged to be keerful 'bout losin' yo' soul. Black folks ain't got no souls, bless de Lord! When _dey_ dies dey _dies_!" She shuffled along, laughing, and began to sing again. Nathaniel looked after her with burning eyes. After she had disappeared between the tree trunks of the forest, the breeze bore back to him a last joyous whoop of "_Oh_, Molly-oh!" He burst into sobs, and shivering, made his way back into his father's darkening, empty house. III At the breakfast table the next morning his father looked at him neutrally. "This day you shall go to salt the sheep in the Miller lot," he announced, "and you may have until the hour before sundown to walk in the wood." "Oh, _father_, really!" "That is what I said," repeated the minister dryly, pushing away from the table. After the boy had gone, carrying the bag of salt and the little package of his noonday meal, the minister sighed heavily. "I fear my weak heart inclines me to too great softness to our son." To his wife he cried out a moment later, "Oh, that some instance of the wrath of Jehovah could come before us now, while our son's spirit is softened. Deacon Truitt said yesterday that one more visitation would save him." Nathaniel walked along soberly, his eyes on the road at his feet, his face quite pale, a sleepless night evidently behind him. He came into the birches without noticing them at first, and when he looked up he was for a moment so taken by surprise that he was transfigured. The valley at his feet shimmered like an opal through the slender white pillars of the trees. The wood was like a many-columned chapel, unroofed and open to the sunlight. Nathaniel gave a cry of rapture, and dropped the bag of salt. "Oh!" he cried, stretching out his arms, and then again, "Oh!"