hurry.
Presently a brilliant light flooded the room. It turned the gray
illumination of the windows to blackness.

Joy enveloped Peter. His own future developed under his eyes with the
same swift clairvoyance that marked his vision of the ills of his
country. He saw himself remedying those ills. He would go about showing
white men and black men the simple truth, the spiritual necessity for
justice and fairness. It was not a question of social equality; it was a
question of clearing a road for the development of Southern life. He
would show white men that to weaken, to debase, to dehumanize the negro,
inflicted a more terrible wound on the South than would any strength the
black man might develop. He would show black men that to hate the
whites, constantly to suspect, constantly to pilfer from them, only
riveted heavier shackles on their limbs.

It was all so clear and so simple! The white South must humanize the
black not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of itself. No one
could resist logic so fundamental.

Peter's heart sang with the solemn joy of a man who had found his work.
All through his youth he had felt blind yearnings and gropings for he
knew not what. It had driven him with endless travail out of Niggertown,
through school and college, and back to Niggertown,--this untiring Hound
of Heaven. But at last he had reached his work. He, Peter Siner, a
mulatto, with the blood of both white and black in his veins, would come
as an evangel of liberty to both white and black. The brown man's eyes
grew moist from Joy. His body seemed possessed of tremendous energy.

As he paced his room there came into the glory of Peter's thoughts the
memory of the Arkwright boy as he sat in the cedar glade brooding on the
fallen needles Peter recalled the hobbledehoy's disjointed words as he
wrestled with the moral and physical problems of adolescence. Peter
recalled his impulse to sit down by young Sam Arkwright, and, as best he
might, give him some clue to the critical and feverish period through
which he was passing.

He had not done so, but Peter remembered the instance down to the very
desperation in the face of the brooding youngster. And it seemed to
Peter that this rejected impulse had been a sign that he was destined to
be an evangel to the whites as well as to the blacks.

The joy of Peter's mission bore him aloft on vast wings. His room seemed
to fall away from him, and he was moving about his country, relea