packed.  Take orders from a colored man?  Have him give you directions, dictate you letters, discipline you if you were unpunctual?  No, indeed!  And if such were my feeling, how must this young Southerner feel?  With this in my mind, I made sure that the part in my back hair was right, and after that precaution soon found myself on my way, in a way somewhat roundabout, to the kettle-supporter sauntering northward along High Walk, and stopping often; the town, and the water, and the distant shores all were so lovely, so belonged to one another, so melted into one gentle impression of wistfulness and tenderness!  I leaned upon the stone parapet and enjoyed the quiet which every surrounding detail brought to my senses.  How could John Mayrant endure such a situation?  I continued to wonder; and I also continued to assure myself it was absurd to suppose that the engagement was broken.

The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there; and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary person in the street.  Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their faces, were evidently coming from a visit.  As the tall one bowed to me I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat.  It was not until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she could have wished that her tall companion had not thus greeted me, a stranger likely to comment upon Kings Port manners.  In her eyes, such free deportment evidently went with her tall companion’s method of speech:  hadn’t the little lady informed me during our first brief meeting that Kings Port at times thought Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s tongue “too downright”?

The two ladies having graciously granted me permission to join them while they took the air, Mrs. Gregory must surely have shocked Mrs. Weguelin by saying to me, “I haven’t a penny for your thoughts, but I’ll exchange.”

“Would you thus bargain in the dark, madam?”

“Oh, I’ll risk that; and, to say truth, even your back, as we came out of that house, was a back of thought.”

“Well, I confess to some thinking.  Shall I begin?”

It was Mrs. Weguelin who quickly replied, smiling:  “Ladies first, you know.  At least we still keep it so in Kings Port.”

“Would we did everywhere!” I exclaimed devoutly; and I was quite aware that beneath the little lady’s gentle smile a setting down had lurked, a setting down of the most delicate nature, administered to me not in the least because I had deserved one, but because she did not like Mrs. Gregory’s “downright” tongue, and could not stop her.