I gave it to her, and I don't believe I looked surprised, any more than when I first saw the pictures of the Disciples, that the artist had painted their skin dark, like it must have been. Mrs. Fernandez was dark too. But her people had come, not from Asia, but from Africa. Like a flash, I saw what this was going to mean in the village. And in the second that I stood there, without time to think it through, something told me to go in, and try to get some idea of what was going to be what. "May I come inside now I'm here?" I says. She took me into the room that was the most settled of any. The piano was there, and a good many books on their shelves. As I remember back now, I must just have stood and stared at them, for impressions were chasing each other across my head like waves on a heaving sea. No less than that, and mebbe more. "I was trying to decide where to put the pictures," she said. "Then we shall have everything settled before my husband gets home to-morrow." We talked about the pictures--they were photographs of Venice and of Spain. Then we talked about the garden, and whether it was too late for her to plant much, and I promised her some aster plants. Then I saw a photograph of a young girl--it was her daughter, in Chicago University, who would be coming home to spend the Summer. Her son had been studying to be a surgeon, she said. "My husband," she told me, "has some work to do in the library in the City. We tried to live there--but we couldn't bear it." "I'm glad you came here," I told her. "It's as nice a little place as any." "I suppose so," she says only. "As nice as--any." I don't think I stayed half an hour. But when I came out of there I walked away from Oldmoxon House not sensing much of anything except a kind of singing thanksgiving. I had never known anything of her people except the kind like our colored wash-woman. I knew about the negro colleges and all, but I guess I never thought about the folks that must be graduating from them. I'd always thought that there might be somebody like Mis' Fernandez, sometime, a long way off, when the Lord and us his helpers got around to it. And here already it was true of some of them. It was like seeing the future come true right in my face. When I shut the gate of Oldmoxon House, I see Mis' Sykes peeking out her front door, and motioning to me. And at the sight of her, that I hadn't thought of since I went into that house, I had all I could do to keep from laughing and crying together, till the street rang with me. I crossed over and went in her gate; and her eye-brows were all cocked inquiring to take in the news. "Go on," she says, "and tell me all there is to tell. Is it all so--the name--and her husband--and all?" "Yes," I says, "it's all so." "I knew it when I see her come," says Mis' Sykes. "Her hat and her veil and her simple, good-cut black clothes--you can't fool me on a lady." "No," I says. "You can't fool me, either."