The old gentleman turned around at last, holding the receiver a little distance from his ear.

“I understand you went to Harvard, Peter.”

“Yes, sir.”  Peter took his eyes momentarily from the telephone.  The old Southerner in the dressing-gown scrutinized the brown man.  He cleared his throat.

“You know, Peter, it gives me a—­a certain satisfaction to see a Harvard man in Hooker’s Bend.  I’m a Harvard man myself.”

Peter stood in the brilliant light, astonished, not at Captain Renfrew’s being a Harvard man,—­he had known that,—­but that this old gentleman was telling the fact to him, Peter Siner, a negro graduate of Harvard.

It was extraordinary; it was tantamount to an offer of friendship, not patronage.  Such an offer in the South disturbed Peter’s poise; it touched him queerly.  And it seemed to explain why Captain Renfrew had received Peter so graciously and was now arranging for Dr. Jallup to visit Caroline.

Peter was moved to the conventional query, asking in what class the Captain had been graduated.  But while his very voice was asking it, Peter thought what a strange thing it was that he, Peter Siner, a negro, and this lonely old gentleman, his benefactor, were spiritual brothers, both sprung from the loins of Harvard, that ancient mother of souls.

[Illustration:  The old gentleman turned around at last]

From the darkness outside, Dr. Jallup’s horn summmoned the two men.  Captain Renfrew got out of his gown and into his coat and turned off his gasolene light.  They walked around the piazza to the front of the house.  In the street the head-lights of the roadster shot divergent rays through the darkness.  They went out.  The old Captain took a seat in the car beside the physician, while Peter stood on the running-board.  A moment later, the clutch snarled, and the machine puttered down the street.  Peter clung to the standards of the auto top, peering ahead.

The men remained almost silent.  Once Dr. Jallup, watching the dust that lay modeled in sharp lights and shadows under the head-lights, mentioned lack of rain.  Their route did not lead over the Big Hill.  They turned north at Hobbett’s corner, drove around by River Street, and presently entered the northern end of the semicircle.

The speed of the car was reduced to a crawl in the bottomless dust of the crescent.  The head-lights swept slowly around the cabins on the concave side of the street, bringing them one by one into stark brilliance and dropping them into obscurity.  The smell of refuse, of uncleaned stables and sties and outhouses hung in the darkness.  Peter bent down under the top of the motor and pointed out his place.  A minute later the machine came to a noisy halt and was choked into silence.  At that moment, in the sweep of the head-light, Peter saw Viny Berry, one of Nan’s younger sisters, coming up from Niggertown’s public well, carrying two buckets of water.