Norton had been compelled to wait twenty years for the hour when he could strike the first decisive blow in the execution of his new life purpose.

But the aim he had set was so high, so utterly unselfish, so visionary, so impossible by the standards of modern materialism, he felt the thrill of the religious fanatic as he daily girded himself to his task.

He was far from being a religious enthusiast, although he had grown a religion of his own, inherited in part, dreamed in part from the depth of his own heart. The first article of this faith was a firm belief in the ever-brooding Divine Spirit and its guidance in the work of man if he but opened his mind to its illumination.

He believed, as in his own existence, that God\'s Spirit had revealed the vision he saw in the hour of his agony, twenty years before when he had watched his boy\'s tiny arms encircle the neck of Cleo, the tawny young animal who had wrecked his life, but won the heart of his child. He had tried to desert his people of the South and awaked with a shock. His mind in prophetic gaze had leaped the years and seen the gradual wearing down of every barrier between the white and black races by the sheer force of daily contact under the new conditions which Democracy had made inevitable.[Pg 196]

Even under the iron laws of slavery it was impossible for an inferior and superior race to live side by side for centuries as master and slave without the breaking down of some of these barriers. But the moment the magic principle of equality in a Democracy became the law of life they must all melt or Democracy itself yield and die. He had squarely faced this big question and given his life to its solution.

When he returned to his old home and installed Cleo as his housekeeper and nurse she was the living incarnation before his eyes daily of the problem to be solved—the incarnation of its subtleties and its dangers. He studied her with the cold intellectual passion of a scientist. Nor was there ever a moment\'s uncertainty or halting in the grim purpose that fired his soul.

She had at first accepted his matter of fact treatment as the sign of ultimate surrender. And yet as the years passed she saw with increasing wonder and rage the gulf between them deepen and darken. She tried every art her mind could conceive and her effective body symbolize in vain. His eyes looked at her, but never saw the woman. They only saw the thing he hated—the mongrel breed of a degraded nation.

He had begun his work at the beginning. He had tried to do the things that were possible. The minds of the people were not yet ready to accept the idea of a complete separation of the races. He planned for the slow process of an epic movement. His paper, in season and out of season, presented the daily life of the black and white races in such a way that the dullest mind must be struck by the fact that their relations ............