of Captain Renfrew coming in at the gate sent Peter to his
room. The hour was near twelve, and it had become a little point of
household etiquette for the mulatto and the white man not to be together
when old Rose jangled the triangle. By this means they forestalled the
mute discourtesy of the old Captain's walking away from his secretary to
eat. The subject of their separate meals had never been mentioned since
their first acrimonious morning. The matter had dropped into the
abeyance of custom, just as the old gentleman had predicted.

Peter had left open his jalousies, but his windows were closed, and now
as he entered he found his apartment flooded with sunshine and filled
with that equable warmth that comes of straining sunbeams through glass.

He prepared for dinner with his mind still hovering about Cissie. He
removed a book and a lamp from the lion-footed table, and drew up an old
chair with which the Captain had furnished his room. It was a delicate
old Heppelwhite of rosewood. It had lost a finial from one of its back
standards, and a round was gone from the left side. Peter never moved
the chair that vague plans sometime to repair it did not occur to him.

When he had cleared his table and placed his chair beside it, he
wandered over to his tall west window and stood looking up the street
through the brilliant sunshine, toward the Arkwright home. No one was in
sight. In Hooker's Bend every one dines precisely at twelve, and at that
hour the streets are empty. It would be some time before Cissie came
back down the street on her way to Niggertown. She first would have to
wash and put away the Arkwright dishes. It would be somewhere about one
o'clock. Nevertheless, he kept staring out through the radiance of the
autumn sunlight with an irrational feeling that she might appear at any
moment. He was afraid she would slip past and he not see her at all. The
thought disturbed him somewhat. It kept him sufficiently on the alert to
stand tapping the balls of his fingers against the glass and looking
steadily toward the Arkwright house.

Presently the watcher perceived that a myriad spider-webs filled the
sunshine with a delicate dancing glister. It was the month of voyaging
spiders. Invisible to Peter, the tiny spinners climbed to the tip-most
twigs of the dead weeds, listed their abdomens, and lassoed the wind
with gossamer lariats; then they let go and sailed away to a hazard of
new fortunes. The air was full of