knows where!
And yet it's your own flesh and blood!"

Suddenly the old lawyer's face broke into the hard, tearless contortions
of the aged. His terrible emotion communicated itself to the sensitive
brown man.

"But, Captain, I myself am a negro. Whom should I marry?"

"No one; no one! Let your seed wither in your loins! It's better to do
that; it's better--" At that moment the clashing of the supper gong fell
on the old man's naked nerves. He straightened up by some reflex
mechanism, turned away from what he thought was his last interview with
his secretary, and proceeded down the piazza into the great empty
dining-room.

CHAPTER XIII

With overwrought nerves Peter Siner entered his room. At five o'clock
that afternoon he had seen Cissie Dildine go up the street to the
Arkwright home to cook one of those occasional suppers. He had been
watching for her return, and in the midst of it the Captain's
extraordinary outburst had stirred him up.

Once in his room, the negro placed the broken Hepplewhite in such a
position that he could rake the street with a glance. Then he tried to
compose himself and await the coming of his supper and the passage of
Cissie. There was something almost pathetic in Peter's endless watching,
all for a mere glimpse or two of the girl in yellow. He himself had no
idea how his nerves and thoughts had woven themselves around the young
woman. He had no idea what a passion this continual doling out of
glimpses had begotten. He did not dream how much he was, as folk naively
put it, in love with her.

His love was strong enough to make him forget for a while the old
lawyer's outbreak. However, as the dusk thickened in the shrubbery and
under the trees, certain of the old gentleman's phrases revisited the
mulatto's mind: "A terrible procession ... marching under a black
shroud.... Your children, your children's children, a terrible
procession,... marching away, God knows where.... And yet--it's your own
flesh and blood!" They were terrific sentences, as if the old man had
been trying to tear from his vision some sport of nature, some
deformity. As the implications spread before Peter, he became more and
more astonished at its content. Even to Captain Renfrew black men were
dehumanized,--shrouded, untouchable creatures.

It delivered to Peter a slow but a profound shock. He glanced about at
the faded magnificence of the room with a queer feeling that he had