Mrs. Sommerton had died when Phyllis was twelve years old, leaving the little girl to be brought up in a boarding-school in Atlanta. The widowed man did not marry again, and when his daughter came home, six months before the opening of our story, it was natural that he should see nothing but loveliness in the fair, bright, only child of his happy wedded life, now ended forever. The reader must have taken for granted that the person under discussion in the conversation touched upon at the outset of this writing was a young man; but Tom Bannister stood for more than the sum of the average young man's values. He was what in our republic is recognized as a promising fellow, bright, magnetic, shifty, well forward in the neologies of society, business, and politics, a born leader in a small way, and as ambitious as poverty and a brimming self-esteem could make him. From his humble law-office window he had seen Phyllis pass along the street in the old Sommerton carriage, and had fallen in love as promptly as possible with her plump, lissome form and pretty face. He sought her acquaintance, avoided with cleverness a number of annoying barriers, assaulted her heart, and won it, all of which stood as mere play when compared with climbing over the pride and prejudice of Colonel Sommerton. For Bannister was nobody in a social way, as viewed from the lofty top of the hill at Sommerton Place; indeed, all of his kinspeople were mountaineers, honest, it is true, but decidedly woodsy, who tilled stony acres in a pocket beyond the first blue ridge yonder. His education seemed good, but it had been snatched from the books by force, with the savage certainty of grip which belongs to genius. Colonel Sommerton, having unbounded confidence in Phyllis's aristocratic breeding, would not open his eyes to the attitude of the young people until suddenly it came into his head that possibly the almost briefless plebeian lawyer had ulterior designs while climbing the hill, as he was doing noticeably often, from town to Sommerton Place. But when this thought arrived the Colonel was prompt to act. He called up the subject at once, and we have seen the close of his interview with Phyllis. Now he stood on the veranda and puffed his cigar with quick, short draughts, as a man does who falters between two horns of a dilemma. He turned his head to one side as if listening to his own thoughts, his tall, pointed collar meantime fitting snugly in a crease of his furrowed jaw. At this moment the shambling, yet in a way facile, footsteps of Barnaby, the sporadic freedman of the household, were soothing. Colonel Sommerton turned his eyes on the comer inquiringly, almost eagerly. “Well, Barn, you're back,” he said. “Yah, sah; I'se had er confab wid 'em,” remarked the negro, seating himself on the top step of the veranda, and mopping his coal-black face with a red cotton handkerchief; “an' hit do beat all. Niggahs is mos'ly eejits, spacially w'en yo' wants 'em to hab some sense.”