sonality of the room, somber and still, flowed about him with a magical release from the inferno of the past years, the last hours. He heard a movement at a door, and the colored woman in the white turban moved to the side of the bed.
"I told her," she said in an aggrieved voice, "there wasn't nothing at all wrong with you. I reckon now you're all ready to fight again or eat. Why did you stir things all up in Richmond and kill good folks?"
"To set you free!" Elim Meikeljohn replied.
She gazed at him thoughtfully.
"Capt'n," she asked finally, "are you free?"
"Why, certainly" he began, and then stopped abruptly, lost in the memory of the dour past. He recalled his father, with a passion for learning, imprisoned in the narrow poverty of his circumstances and surroundings; he remembered Hester, with her wishful gaze in the confines of her invalid chair; his own laborious lonely days. Freedom, a high and difficult term, he saw concerned regions of the spirit not liberated—solved—by a simple declaration on the body. The war had been but the initial, most facile step. The woman had silenced his sounding assertion, humiliated him, by a word. He gazed at her with a new, less confident interest. The mental effort brought a momentary recurrence of fever; he flushed and muttered: "Freedom . . . spirit."
"You're not as wholesome as you appeared," the woman judged. "You can't have nothing beside a glass of milk." She crossed the room and, stirring the fire, put on fresh coal that ignited with an oily crackle. Again at the door she paused. "Don't you try to move about," she di-
