Mrs. Woolcape had an especial look of familiarity that perplexed Neil until he realized that she was surprisingly like his own mother. He denied it, and shivered, and looked again. She seemed older than “Mum,” and at once more calm and more resolute, yet in her color of pale honey, her chiseled-down nose, her small shy mouth, her eyes that asked nothing for herself, she was so like his mother that he felt bound to her and to her family by something more than a tale about a moccasined frontier rover. This was a woman whose questions he would answer gladly, and in her smile and tenderness he could find solace.

* * * * *

“The Lord be with us, while we are parted one from another, the Lord wash us clean of corruption, the Lord dwell in loving kindness among us–-”

Evan Brewster paused, he looked straight at Neil, he had a wonderful smile of friendship, and he ended, “loving kindness among us all, rich or needy, black and white—His children.”

The African girls in the choir, who were American girls, were chanting “Blessed be the tie that binds,” but the spell was shattered as everyone rose—everyone but Neil, who sat enchanted.

When he moved toward the door with the last of the congregation, he felt their doubt whether he was friendly or just curious; whether they should bow or ignore him. But all of them who had come from the South had learned that it was safer to do both, and get away quick.

At the door, Dr. Brewster was shaking hands, and he spoke to Neil not otherwise than to the others: “It has been pleasant to have you with us this morning, Brother.”

The conventionality of it irritated Neil, yet was that not just what his own Dr. Buncer said?

Seen close, as they shook hands—and by now Neil had enough training so that he no longer made a production of it—Dr. Brewster had tiny folds of flesh over the inner corners of his eyes, he was moist as a fieldhand and had the dismaying grip of one, and in his eyes was every sorrow since Golgotha.

When Neil was rather confusedly out on the sidewalk, he was not glad that the ordeal was finished; he was lost and puzzled in a common world where neither the hard-faced whites whom he saw now on the Street nor the tough and lounging Negro gamblers could conceivably have any of Evan Brewster’s patience for his quandary.

For a long time he stared at the Ethiopia Motion Picture Playhouse, across the way, as though it were Chartres Cathedral. He did not realize that he was standing beside the Woolcape family, who were in after-church gossip with neighbors. Captain Emerson Woolcape looked as though he recognized Neil but did not expect to be recognized himself, and he was surprised when Neil half bowed, and babbled, “I thought that was you, o’ man. Haven’t seen you since high school.”

The Woolcapes stared at him with a silence that could become either welcome or hostility. He rushed on, longing, for reasons not too clear to him, to be accepted by them: