"Well, I'll subscribe ten dollars," said Miss Pinckney; "I reckon the darkie babies won't be any the worse for a _creche_ and maybe not very much better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil good manners and respect for their betters into their heads I'd give you forty. I'm sure I don't know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to, one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk the other day, bag of impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery leery what-d'-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces s'nough to raise Cain in any one's heart." "I know," replied the dark girl, "and they are getting worse; the whip is the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists." "Don't call them my beautiful Abolitionists," replied the other. "I didn't make 'em. All the same I don't believe in whipping and never did. It's the whip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk like Christians slavery would have been the greatest god-send to blacks. It was what stays are to women. But they didn't. The low down white made slavery impossible with his whipping and oppression and _we_ had to suffer. Well, we haven't ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying like rabbits there's no knowing what we've got to suffer yet." Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. "Now, that girl," said the elder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, "is just the type of the people I was telling her about. No idea but whipping. _She_ wouldn't have much mercy on a human creature black or tan _or_ white. Thick skinned. She didn't even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what brought her here this hour with her _creche_. It's just a fad. If they got up a charity to make alligator bait of the black babies so's to sell the alligator skins to buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it'd be all the same to her. Something to gad about with. I wish I'd kept that ten dollars in my pocket." Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night--before ten--and Phyl, who was free to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching the moon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a plan that had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckney for bed. She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dial becoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mystery which is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn. Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of the northern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at times and in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one is walking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed lit by a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would never lose the charm of dawn.