She sat down on the bed suddenly, as though the blood had flowed out of her heart, weakening her.

“A sister like you that would have stuck; and—­and I’m going to make good to a sister like you, Renie.  I am, this time.  Please believe me, Renie.  I am!  I am!”

Her hand lay pressed to his cheek and she could feel the warm course of his tears.  “Izzy, I knew you wasn’t yellow; I—­I knew you wasn’t.”

Sobs shook him suddenly and he buried his face in the pillow beside her.

“Why, Izzy!  Why, Izzy darling, what—­what is it, Izzy darling?”

“It’s nothing.  You—­you get out, Renie.  I’m all right; only—­only it’s—­it’s—­Now that it’s all over, I—­I—­Just let me alone a minute, Renie.  Go—­you—­please—­please!”

She closed the door behind her and fumbled through the gloom of the hallway, her hand faltering as she groped ahead.

From the recesses of the moonflower vine Mr. Hochenheimer rose to meet her; and, because her limbs would tremble, she slid quickly into her chair.

“You—­you must excuse me, Mr. Hochenheimer.”

“It’s all right, Miss Renie.  I take up where we left off.  It ain’t so easy, Miss Renie, to begin all over again to say it, but—­but will you be my—­will you be my—­”

She was suddenly in his arms, burrowing against the speckled waistcoat a little resting-place for her head.

IN MEMORIAM

Toward the city Mother Earth turns a plate-glass eye and an asphalt bosom.  The rhythm of her heart-beats does not penetrate through paved streets.  That cadence is for those few of her billion children who have stayed by to sleep with an ear to the mossy floor of her woodlands.  The prodigals, the future Tammany leaders, merchant princes, cotton kings, and society queens march on, each to an urban destiny.

Nor is the return of the prodigal to Mother Earth along a piked highway.  The road back to Nature is full of her own secrets, and few who have trod the streets of the city remember the brambled return, or care.

Men who know to the centime each fluctuation of the wheat-market have no eye for the tawny beauty of a whole field of the precious product fluctuating to a breeze.  Women stayed by steel and convention into the mold of form love the soft faces of flowers looking up at them from expensive corsages, but care not for their nativity.  Greeks, first of men, perched their gods up on Olympus and wandered down to build cities.

Because the city is as insidious as the sleeping-draught of an Indian soothsayer, under its spell men go mad for gain and forget that to stand on the brow of a mountain at night, arms outstretched in kinship to Vega and Capella, is a golden moment of purer alloy than certified bonds.  What magnate remembers where the best tackle squirms, or the taste of grass sucked in from the tender end of the blade?  All progress is like that.  How immediately are the yesterdays metamorphosed into memories; and memories, even the stanchest of them, mold and disintegrate.