plants she watched hours to drive them off, and catching now and then a pulsing pink-eyed invader, she talked to it earnestly:
‚ÄúBrer Rabbit‚ÅÝ‚Äîpoor little Brer Rabbit, don‚Äôt you know you mustn‚Äôt eat Zora‚Äôs cotton? Naughty, naughty Brer Rabbit.‚Äù And then she would show it where she had gathered piles of fragrant weeds for it and its fellows.
The golden green of the first leaves darkened, and the plants sprang forward steadily.
Never before was such a magnificent beginning, a full month ahead of other cotton.
The rain swept down in laughing, bubbling showers, and laved their thirsty souls, and Zora held her beating breast day by day lest it rain too long or too heavily.
The sun burned fiercely upon the young cotton plants as the spring hastened, and they lifted their heads in darker, wilder luxuriance; for the time of hoeing was at hand.
These days were days of alternate hope and doubt with Bles Alwyn. Strength and ambition and inarticulate love were fighting within him. He felt, in the dark thousands of his kind about him, a mighty calling to deeds.
He was becoming conscious of the narrowness and straightness of his black world, and red anger flashed in him ever and again as he felt his bonds. His mental horizon was broadening as he prepared for the college of next year; he was faintly grasping the wider, fuller world, and its thoughts and aspirations.
But beside and around and above all this, like subtle, permeating ether, was‚ÅÝ‚ÄîZora. His feelings for her were not as yet definite, expressed, or