The rest was merely arrangement for meeting the traveller, all of which was done away with by his earlier arrival.

“A prim old party, with an exalted idea of the family,” commented Philip mentally.  “Well-to-do, apparently, or he wouldn’t be having a winter house in the city.  I wonder what the boy Shelby is like.  At twenty-two he should be doing something more profitable than spending an entire summer out here, I should say.”

The questions faded into the general content of his mind at the glimpse of another stately old pillared homestead, white and deep down its avenue of locusts.  At length he stopped his horse to wait for a ragged negro trudging cheerfully down the road.

“Do you know a place around here called Fairfield?” he asked.

“Yessah.  I does that, sah.  It’s that ar’ place right hyeh, sah, by yo’ hoss.  That ar’s Fahfiel’.  Shall I open the gate fo’ you, boss?” and Philip turned to see a hingeless ruin of boards held together by the persuasion of rusty wire.

“The home of my fathers looks down in the mouth,” he reflected aloud.

The old negro’s eyes, gleaming from under shaggy sheds of eyebrows, watched him, and he caught the words.

“Is you a Fahfiel’, boss?” he asked eagerly.  “Is you my young Marse?” He jumped at the conclusion promptly.  “You favors de fam’ly mightily, sah.  I heard you was comin’”; the rag of a hat went off and he bowed low.  “Hit’s cert’nly good news fo’ Fahfiel’, Marse Philip, hit’s mighty good news fo’ us niggers, sah.  I’se b’longed to the Fahfiel’ fam’ly a hund’ed years, Marse—­me and my folks, and I wishes yo’ a welcome home, sah—­welcome home, Marse Philip.”

Philip bent with a quick movement from his horse, and gripped the twisted old black hand, speechless.  This humble welcome on the highway caught at his heart deep down, and the appeal of the colored people to Southerners, who know them, the thrilling appeal of a gentle, loyal race, doomed to live forever behind a veil and hopeless without bitterness, stirred for the first time his manhood.  It touched him to be taken for granted as the child of his people; it pleased him that he should be “Marse Philip” as a matter of course, because there had always been a Marse Philip at the place.  It was bred deeper in the bone of him than he knew, to understand the soul of the black man; the stuff he was made of had been Southern two hundred years.

The old man went off down the white limestone road singing to himself, and Philip rode slowly under the locusts and beeches up the long drive, grass-grown and lost in places, that wound through the woodland three-quarters of a mile to his house.  And as he moved through the park, through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at last coming to his own.  He longed with an unreasonable seizure of desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it with life and prosperity as it had once been filled, surround it with cheerful faces of colored people whom he might make happy and comfortable.  If only he had money to pay off the mortgage, to put the place once in order, it would be the ideal setting for the life that seemed marked out for him—­the life of a writer.