“Now, wut we all goin’ do wid dis po’ mudderless chile?” she said, addressing the room at large. The other occupants of the room gathered behind Serena, but there was something about Bess’s look that held them quiet. They stood there waiting and saying nothing. Slowly Bess straightened up, her face lowered and pressed against that of the sleeping child. Then she raised her eyes and met the gaze of the complacent older woman. What Serena saw there was not so much the old defiance that she had expected, as it was an inflexible determination, and, behind it, a new-born element in the woman that rendered the scarred visage incandescent. She stepped back, and lowered her eyes. Bess strained the child to her breast with an elemental intensity of possession, and spoke in a low, deep voice that vested her words with sombre meaning. “Is Clara come back a’ready, since she dead, an’ say somet’ing ’bout ‘_we_’ tuh yuh ’bout dis chile?” She put the question to the group, her eyes taking in the circle of faces as she spoke. There was no response; and at the suggestion of a possible return of the dead, the circle drew together instinctively. “Berry well den,” said Bess solemnly. “Ontell she do, I goin’ stan’ on she las’ libbin’ word an’ keep dis chile fuh she ’til she do come back.” Serena was hopelessly beaten, and she knew it. “Oh, berry well,” she capitulated. “All I been goin’ tuh do wuz jus’ tuh puhwide um wid er propuh Christian raisin’. But ef she done gib um tuh yuh, dere ain’t nuttin mo’ I kin do, I guess.” VI [Illustration] PART VI October blew down from the north, bracing, and frosty-clear. It sent a breeze racing like mad over the bay and bouncing into the court to toss the clotheslines like lanyards of signal flags. The torpid city and wide, slumbrous marshes were stung to sudden life and laughed up at the far, crisp blue of the sky. Out in the harbor mouth, a faint wisp of smoke grew and blackened, and presently beneath it the rusty hull of a tramp lifted from the Atlantic, and thrust its blunt nose into the waters of the bay. Summer had gone. Soon the cotton would be coming through. It was nine o’clock, and still Porgy lingered in the court. His blood leapt swiftly in his veins, and he experienced that sweet upsurge of life that the North knows with the bursting of spring, but that comes most keenly to the sultry lands with the strong breath of autumn. Yet, when he looked up at the sky, a vague prescience of disaster darkened his spirit. He sat beside Bess in the doorway, with his eyes upon the child in her lap. After a while he took the baby into his arms, and then the foreboding suddenly became pain. He looked up and met the gaze of the woman. It was there in her eyes also, plain for him to see. Out in the silence of the street a sound commenced to grow. Only a faint, far murmur at first, it gathered weight until it became a steady rumble, with a staccato clip, clip, clip running through it.