“Yoh must go, my little girl,” he said at last.

Whatever he did must be done quickly.  She came up, combing the thin gray hairs through her fingers.

“Father, I dunnot understan’ what it is, rightly.  But stay with me,—­stay, father!”

“Yoh’ve a many frien’s, Lo,” he said, with a keen flash of jealousy.  “Ther’s none like yoh,—­none.”

She put her misshapen head and scarred face down on his hand, where he could see them.  If it had ever hurt her to be as she was, if she had ever compared herself bitterly with fair, beloved women, she was glad now and thankful for every fault and deformity that brought her nearer to him, and made her dearer.

“They’re kind, but ther’s not many loves me with true love, like yoh.  Stay, father!  Bear it out, whatever it be.  Th’ good time’ll come, father.”

He kissed her, saying nothing, and went with her down the street.  When he left her, she waited, and, creeping back, hid near the mill.  God knows what vague dread was in her brain; but she came back to watch and help.

Old Yare wandered through the great loom-rooms of the mill with but one fact clear in his cloudy, faltering perception,—­that above him the man lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than death on him to-morrow.  Up and down, aimlessly, with his stoker’s torch in his hand, going over the years gone and the years to come, with the dead hatred through all of the pitiless man above him,—­with now and then, perhaps, a pleasanter thought of things that had been warm and cheerful in his life,—­of the corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in “th’ Alabam’,”—­of the scow his young master gave him once, the first thing he really owned:  he was almost as proud of it as he was of Lois when she was born.  Most of all remembering the good times in his life, he went back to Lois.  It was all good, there, to go back to.  What a little chub she used to be!  Remembering, with bitter remorse, how all his life he had meant to try and do better, on her account, but had kept putting off and putting off until now.  And now—­Did nothing lie before him but to go back and rot yonder?  Was that the end, because he never had learned better, and was a “dam’ nigger”?

“I’ll not leave my girl!” he muttered, going up and down,—­“I’ll not leave my girl!”

If Holmes did sleep above him, the trial of the day, of which we have seen nothing, came back sharper in sleep.  While the strong self in the man lay torpid, whatever holier power was in him came out, undaunted by defeat, and unwearied, and took the form of dreams, those slighted messengers of God, to soothe and charm and win him out into fuller, kindlier life.  Let us hope that they did so win him; let us hope that even in that unreal world the better nature of the man triumphed at last, and claimed its reward before the terrible reality broke upon him.