When he reentered the library the candle was guttering in the burned wings of a night-moth. The place looked all at once gaunt and desolate and despoiled. What could Virginia, what could Damory Court, be to him without her? The wrinkled note lay on the desk and he bent suddenly with a sharp catching breath and kissed it. There welled over him a wave of rebellious longing. The candle spread to a hazy yellow blur. The walls fell away. He stood under the moonlight, with his arms about her, his lips on hers and his heart beating to the sound of the violins behind them. [Pg 358] He laughed—a harsh wild laugh that rang through the gloomy room. Then he threw himself on the couch and buried his face in his hands. He was still lying there when the misty rain-wet dawn came through the shutters. [Pg 359] CHAPTER XLI THE COMING OF GREEF KING It was Sunday afternoon, and under the hemlocks, Rickey Snyder had gathered her minions—a dozen children from the near-by houses with the usual sprinkling of little blacks from the kitchens. There were parents, of course, to whom this mingling of color and degree was a matter of conventional prohibition, but since the advent of Rickey, in whose soul lay a Napoleonic instinct of leadership, this was more honored in the breach than in the observance. “My! Ain’t it scrumptious here now!” said Cozy Cabell, hanging yellow lady-slippers over her ears. “I wish we could play here always.” “Mr. Valiant will let us,” said Rickey. “I asked him.” “Oh, he will,” responded Cozy gloomily, “but he’ll probably go and marry somebody who’ll be mean about it.” “Everybody doesn’t get married,” said one of the Byloe twins, with masculine assurance. “Maybe he won’t.” “Much a boy knows about it!” retorted Cozy scornfully. ”Women have to, and some one of [Pg 360]them will make him. (Greenville Female Seminary Simms, if you slap that little nigger again, I’ll slap you!)” Greenie rolled over on the grass and tittered. “Miss Mattie Sue didn’,” she said. “Ah heah huh say de yuddah day et wuz er moughty good feelin’ ter go ter baid Mistis en git up Marstah!” “Well,” said Cozy, tossing her head till the flower earrings danced, “I’m going to get married if the man hasn’t got anything but a character and a red mustache. Married women don’t have to prove they could have got a husband if they had wanted to.” “Let’s play something,” proposed Rosebud Meredith, on whom the discussion palled. “Let’s play King, King Katiko.” “It’s Sunday!”—this from her smaller and more righteous sister. “We’re forbidden to play anything but Bible games on Sunday, and if Rosebud does, I’ll tell.” “Jay-bird tattle-tale!” sang Rosebud derisively. “Don’t care if you do!” “Well,” decreed Rickey. “We’ll play Sunday-school then. It would take a saint to object to that. I’m superintendent and this stump’s my desk. All you children sit down under that tree.”