Seth was, even now, packing up the quaint contraptions he called his luggage, and old Darius, the coloured odd job man, was getting a barrow out of the tool-house to wheel the said luggage to Seth's grandmother's house, somewhere in the negro quarters of the town. The whole affair of the impudence and dismissal had not taken two minutes, but the effects were widespread and lasting. Dinah was weeping, the kitchen in confusion; one might have thought a death had occurred in the house, and Miss Pinckney presiding at the breakfast table was voluble and silent by turns. "Never mind," said Pinckney with all the light-heartedness of a man towards domestic affairs. "Seth's not the only nigger in Charleston." "I'm not bothering about his going," replied Miss Pinckney. "He was all thumbs and of no manner of use but to make work; what upsets me is the way he hid his nature. Time and again I've been good to that boy. He looked all black grin and frizzled head, nothing bad in him you'd say--and then! It's like opening a cupboard and finding a toad, and there's Dinah going on like a fool; she's crying because he's going, not because he gave me impudence. Rachel's the same, and I'm just going now to the kitchen to give them a talking to all round." Off she went. "I know what that means," said Pinckney. "It's only once in a couple of years that there's any trouble with servants and then--oh, my! You see Aunt Maria is not the same as other people because she loves every one dearly, and looks on the servants as part of the family. I expect she loves that black imp Seth, for all his faults, and that's what makes her so upset." "Same as I was about Rafferty," said Phyl with a little laugh. Pinckney laughed also and their eyes met. Just like a veil swept aside, something indefinable that had lain between them, some awkwardness arising, maybe, from the Rafferty incident, vanished in that moment. Phyl had been drawing steadily towards him lately, till, unknown to her, he had entered into the little romance of Juliet, so much so that if last night, at that magical moment when he met her on entering the gate--if at that moment he had taken her in his arms and kissed her, Love might have been born instantly from his embrace. But the psychological moment had passed, a crisis unknown to him and almost unknown to her. And now, as if to seal the triumph of the commonplace, suddenly, the vague reservation that had lain between them, disappeared. "Do you know," said he, "you taught me a lesson that day, a lesson every man ought to be taught before he leaves college." "What was that?" asked Phyl. "Never to interfere in household affairs. Of course Rafferty wasn't exactly a household affair because he belonged mostly to the stable, still he was your affair more than mine. Household affairs belong to women, and men ought to leave them alone." "Maybe you're right," said Phyl, "but all the same I was wrong. Do you know I've never apologised for what I said."