lly sweet of her.

Cissie picked up her handkerchief with its torn edge, which she had laid
on the table. Evidently she was about to go.

"I surely don't know what will become of me," she said, looking at it.

In a reversal of feeling Peter did not want her to go away quite then.
He cast about for some excuse to detain her a moment longer.

"Now, Cissie," he began, "if you are really going to leave Hooker's
Bend--"

"I'm not going," she said, with a long exhalation. "I--" she swallowed--
"I just thought that up to--ask you to--to--You see," she explained, a
little breathless, "I thought you still loved me and had forgiven me by
the way you watched for me every day at the window."

This speech touched Peter more keenly than any of the little drama the
girl had invented. It hit him so shrewdly he could think of nothing more
to say.

Cissie moved toward the window and undid the latch.

"Good night, Peter." She paused a moment, with her hand on the catch.
"Peter," she said, "I'd almost rather see you marry some other girl than
try so terrible a thing."

The big, full-blooded athlete smiled faintly.

"You seem perfectly sure marriage would cure me of my mission."

Cissie's face reddened faintly.

"I think so," she said briefly. "Good night," and she disappeared in the
dark space she had opened, and closed the jalousies softly after her.

CHAPTER XV

Cissie Dildine's conviction that marriage would cure Peter of his
mission persisted in the mulatto's mind long after the glamour of the
girl had faded and his room had regained the bleak emptiness of a
bachelor's bedchamber.

Cissie had been so brief and positive in her statement that Peter, who
had not thought on the point at all, grew more than half convinced she
was right.

Now that he pondered over it, it seemed there was a difference between
the outlook of a bachelor and that of a married man. The former
considered humanity as a balloonist surveys a throng,--immediately and
without perspective,--but the latter always sees mankind through the
frame of his family. A single man tends naturally to philosophy and
reform; a married man to administration and statesmanship. There have
been no great unmarried statesmen; there have been no great married
philosophers or reformers.

Now that Cissie had pointed out this universal rule, Peter saw it very
clearly. And Peter suspected that beneath this rough classification, and
co