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“Didn' say; she wrote.”

Peter looked around, frankly astonished.

“Wrote?”

“Yeah; co'se she wrote.”

“What made her write?” a fantasy of Ida May dumb flickered before the mulatto.

​

Up and down its street flows the slow negro life of the village

​“Why, Ida May's in Nashville.” Caroline looked at Peter. “She wrote to Cissie, astin' 'bout you. She ast is you as bright in yo' books as you is in yo' color.” The old negress gave a pleased abdominal chuckle as she admired her broad-shouldered brown son.

“But I saw Ida May standing on the wharf-boat the day I came home,” protested Peter, still bewildered.

“No you ain't. I reckon you seen Cissie. Dey looks kind o' like when you is fur off.”

“Cissie?” repeated Peter. Then he remembered a smaller sister of Ida May's, a little, squalling, yellow, wet-nosed nuisance that had annoyed his adolescence. So that little spoil-sport had grown up into the girl he had mistaken for Ida May. This fact increased his sense of strangeness—that sense of great change that had fallen on the village in his absence which formed the groundwork of all his renewed associations.