leaving Dixieland, walked for forty minutes, until he came up in the gap over the town again. It was sunset. The sun’s vast rim, blood-red, rested upon the western earth, in a great field of murky pollen. It sank beyond the western ranges. The clear sweet air was washed with gold and pearl. The vast hills melted into purple solitudes: they were like Canaan and rich grapes. The motors of cove people toiled up around the horse-shoe of the road. Dusk came. The bright winking lights in the town went up. Darkness melted over the town like dew: it washed out all the day’s distress, the harsh confusions. Low wailing sounds came faintly up from Niggertown.
And above him the proud stars flashed into heaven: there was one, so rich and low, that he could have picked it, if he had climbed the hill beyond the Jew’s great house. One, like a lamp, hung low above the heads of men returning home. (O Hesperus, you bring us all good things.) One had flashed out the light that winked on him the night that Ruth lay at the feet of Boaz; and one on Queen Isolt; and one on Corinth and on Troy. It was night, vast brooding night, the mother of loneliness, that washes our stains away. He was washed in the great river of night, in the Ganges tides of redemption. His bitter wound was for the moment healed in him: he turned his face upward to the proud and tender stars, which made him a god and a grain of dust, the brother of eternal beauty and the son of death—alone, alone.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Helen laughed huskily, prodding him in the ribs. “Your girl went and got married, didn’t she? She fooled you. You got left.”
“Wh-a-a-a-t!” said Eliza banteringly, “has my boy been—as the fellow says” (she sniggered behind her hand) “has my boy been a— courtin’?” She puckered her lips in playful reproach.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered angrily. “What fellow says!”
His scowl broke into an angry grin as he caught his sister’s eye. They laughed.
“Well,’Gene,” said the girl seriously, “forget about it. You’re only a kid yet. Laura is a grown woman.”
