is extraordinary sentence had come about,
but in a kind of breath he realized that he and this almost white girl
were not of Niggertown. No doubt she had been arguing that he, Peter,
who was one sort of man, was trying to lead quite another sort of men
moved by different racial impulses, and such leading could only come to
confusion. He saw the implications at once.

It was an extraordinary idea, an explosive idea, such as Cissie seemed
to have the faculty of touching off. He sat staring at her.

It was the white blood in his own veins that had sent him struggling up
North, that had brought him back with this flame in his heart for his
own people. It was the white blood in Cissie that kept her struggling to
stand up, to speak an unbroken tongue, to gather around her the delicate
atmosphere and charm of a gentlewoman. It was the Caucasian in them
buried here in Niggertown. It was their part of the tragedy of millions
of mixed blood in the South. Their common problem, a feeling of their
joint isolation, brought Peter to a sense of keen and tingling nearness
to the girl.

She was talking again, very earnestly, almost tremulously:

"Why don't you go North, Peter? I think and think about you staying
here. You simply can't grow up and develop here. And now, especially,
when everybody doubts you. If you'd go North--"

"What about you, Cissie? You say we're together--"

"Oh, I'm a woman. We haven't the chance to do as we will."

A kind of titillation went over Peter's scalp and body.

"Then you are going to stay here and marry--Tump?" He uttered the name
in a queer voice.

Tears started in Cissie's eyes; her bosom lifted to her quick breathing.

"I--I don't know what I'm going to do," she stammered miserably.

Peter leaned over her with a drumming heart; he heard her catch her
breath.

"You don't care for Tump?" he asked with a dry mouth.

She gasped out something, and the next moment Peter felt her body sink
limply in his groping arms. They clung together closely, quiveringly.
Three nights of vigil, each thinking miserably and wistfully of the
other, had worn the nerves of both man and girl until they were ready to
melt together at a touch. Her soft body clinging to his own, the little
nervous pressures of her arms, her eased breathing at his neck, wiped
away Siner's long sense of strain. Strength and peace seemed to pour
from her being into his by a sort of spiritual osmosis. She resigned her
head to his palm