She put her hand in his to say good-by. "You're my boy, you remember." There was a world of gentleness and love in her voice. "Do you know, I told Kathleen and then Dick that I had a brother, a little brother who was in school." "I's feared you shouldn't have said that, Hertha." "I had to have some relatives, didn't I? And I just naturally had you. And we'll never forget one another. And I tell you," looking with wet eyes back down the long aisle of the church to where the Bible lay on the reading-desk, "I know what heaven's going to be like. It isn't going to have any golden streets. Think how horrid and hard and glaring they'd be! It will have spreading trees and flowers, lilies and asphodels and green grass--yes, and white sand; and I engage you now to go out walking with me the first Sunday." The tears were in his eyes as well as hers. "I'll love to be there waiting fer you, Sister," he answered. She gripped him in her arms for a moment and then with a gulping sob opened the door and went out into the street. CHAPTER XXXI "Keep out of the conflict!" This admonition ran through Hertha's mind as she went to school Monday morning. She saw herself standing at the little table in the restaurant with the cynical old major looking at her kindly, admiringly. The conflict to which he had alluded had been that of the working-class, but his words might include all battle whether of labor or of race. If she married Dick she would be out of the conflict, out of the eternal worry of earning a living. But she would also be out of the conflict of race, forever removed from the life that had been hers such a short time ago. If she accepted the love of this young man from Georgia with his talk of "black wenches" and "buck niggers," she accepted complete ostracism from her past. And not only ostracism,--she had grown to realize that this was likely whatever course she chose,--but the past that had meant so much, that had helped to make her what she was, gentle-mannered, deft, well-educated, this past she must see despised. Dick might forgive those years but only if she would forget them. He would be ambitious for them both, and she must blot from her mind everything that touched upon the shocking disgrace, for so he would account it, of her world until eight months ago.