When Hertha went to her room that night a little breeze greeted her as she sat down by her window. It was cloudy at first, but in a few moments the clouds broke and the moonlight streamed upon the dark trees and the white sand. She watched the moon sailing through the clouds, she smelt the roses by the porch, and the wall that her will had built against her sweet and rapturous thoughts broke down, and with a rush her spirit was swept with tumultuous love. "Cinderella," Lee said to her the next morning as she turned into the orange grove, "you've been a shockingly long time coming." "I know it," she answered, "but there were so many things to think of, sitting by the fire." "Don't think," he urged. "I've given it up. Don't think, but live." And this time she lifted up her face and, without a thought, gave him a kiss. CHAPTER V "Hertha," Ellen said the next afternoon, "have you any plans for the future?" School had just closed, Miss Patty had given her maid an afternoon off, and the two sisters were walking together toward their home. "Any plans?" Hertha was startled. "I thought our plans were made for good when we came here." "I hope not!" Ellen declared decidedly. "I'm willing to work here now for next to nothing, but I shall try for a bigger job some day; and you, honey, you don't always want to be Miss Patty's maid." "I don't know; why shouldn't I?" "This is a dull life for you, Hertha. Sometimes I think we ought never to have come here." "Ellen!" "It's different for mammy and me; we're older." "You're only four years older than I." "I think that really I'm a great deal older than you. But I get so much more out of Merryvale than you do. The people who live in these cabins--well, they're problems to me, human problems that I'm trying to solve. There's hardly a home that hasn't in it some boy or girl whom I'm watching almost as though he were my child. I'm working for the children, Hertha, the colored children who will soon be men and women and who ought to have just as good a chance as white children in this world." "They never will in America." "I'm not so sure," Ellen answered. They were walking in the pine region back of the river. To a newcomer many of the cabins would have looked untidy; the ubiquitous hog would have been pronounced a public nuisance, and the facilities for washing inadequate; but to Ellen the settlement in which she had been working for five years was a garden of progress, and if a few of the plants made a determined stand to remain weeds, she did not let them hide her numerous hardy flowers. In her heart she meant ultimately to uproot them. Old Mr. Merryvale would never stand for severity, but the next generation was at work upon the place and might be induced to aid her in exiling the degenerate few.