“I should think you’d hate to leave the old place,” Lem observed, letting his bright gaze wander over the green pasture strip and the narrow creek bottoms where the young corn waved idly in the evening breeze. Indie’s thin face clouded with the shadow of regret, but she made no reply, for she would not have admitted, on pain of death, that her heart ached with the pathos of renunciation. “Ain’t there nary thing I can do for you, Indie?” Lem asked, after an awkward pause, in what seemed to the listener a very off-hand, indifferent voice. “No thanky. There ain’t a thing to do but to take the cow over to board with the Bankses. Seems like I can’t bear the thoughts of sellin’ her to out-an’-out strangers, so I thought I’d board her till some of the neighbors gits ready to buy her. Miss Clayton’s goin’ to keep Billy for me till I get settled, so’s I can take him.” Billy, the big tortoise-shell cat that purred on the door step, lifted his head at the sound of his own name and blinked contentedly, whereupon Lem stooped and stroked his glossy fur. “I guess Billy’ll miss you if no one else does,” he remarked dryly. Then he rose and held out a big brown hand. “Well, good-bye, Indie, an’ good luck to you,” said he. “If ever I can do anything for you, let me know, will you?” “Good-bye,” said Indie gravely. Indie went away the next morning—a morning full of balm and peace. Fresh, fragrant winds scattered the rose petals thickly over her shoulders as she hurried down the garden path to meet the stage. She did not trust herself to glance back, for some strange, dumb emotion tugged at her heart-strings and soundless voices called to her out of the sweet silence that enveloped earth and sky. She shivered as she entered the hot, sultry, dust-laden train with its burden of dull, spiritless travelers. “It must be the air,” she murmured to herself as she sank into a seat. “These cars is awful clost with the sun beatin’ down on ’em an no air stirrin’. Now, if a body was at home they could open the doors an’ winders an’ set in the shade.” “Home! Home! Home!” said the swiftly revolving wheels that bore her relentlessly away from the old, sweetly familiar scenes toward an unknown, lonely future. She watched the green fields and woods that whirled past the windows until they grew less and less frequent, with dingy little stations squatted between them. The landscape changed and the car grew hotter and the smoke thicker, for the train was approaching the factory district of Birmingham, the Alabama metropolis. Children, with unclean, pallid, faces, stared up at the car windows as the train pulled through their grimy quarters, and men in blackened, greasy clothes lounged along the tracks in the occasional shade of a sweltering brick wall.