There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted on that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come into her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly romantic act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening, both Sam and the children had been installed in the house. A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions regarding food for the children. “They will want bread and milk, and beds must be found for them,” she said, and then, although her mind was still filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam’s children by some other woman, she took her plunge. “This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and these are our three children,” she announced to the puzzled and smiling servant. They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden. In the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more. “Don’t bring lamps, a candle will do,” Sue said, and she went to stand near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point of breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive sense of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children feel at home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys. “There is a barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you everything,” she said, smiling at them. * * * * * A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue’s house and a road that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and the Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In the feeble light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick branches overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into the darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before the house. He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling for possession of his person. There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring always to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way, trampled people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped forward, the man of achievement. And then there was another personality, a quite different being altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or walked before men. What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive thing within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him out of his place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many times it had tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him. It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into darkness.