“Oh, no,”—­she spoke with polite haste,—­“I’m just going to stay a minute.  I don’t know what you’ll think of me.”  She looked intently at him.

“I think it lovely of you to come.”  He was disgusted with the triteness of this remark, but he could think of nothing else.

“I don’t know,” demurred the octoroon, with her faint doubtful smile.  “Persons don’t welcome beggars very cordially.”

“If all beggars were so charming—­” Apparently he couldn’t escape banalities.

But Cissie interrupted whatever speech he meant to make, with a return of her almost painful seriousness.

“I really came to ask you to help me, Peter.”

“Then your need has brought me a pleasure, at least.”  Some impulse kept the secretary making those foolish complimentary speeches which keep a conversation empty and insincere.

“Oh, Peter, I didn’t come here for you to talk like that!  Will you do what I want?”

“What do you want, Cissie?” he asked, sobered by her voice and manner.

“I want you to help me, Peter.”

“All right, I will.”  He spaced his words with his speculations about the nature of her request.  “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to help me go away.”

Peter looked at her in surprise.  He hardly knew what he had been expecting, but it was not this.

Some repressed emotion crept into the girl’s voice.

“Peter, I—­I can’t stay here in Hooker’s Bend any longer.  I want to go away.  I—­I’ve got to go away.”

Peter stood regarding her curiously and at the same time sympathetically.

“Where do you want to go, Cissie?”

The girl drew a long breath; her bosom lifted and dropped abruptly.

“I don’t know; that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about.”

“You don’t know where you want to go?” He smiled faintly.  “How do you know you want to go at all?”

“Oh, Peter, all I know is I must leave Hooker’s Bend!” She gave a little shiver.  “I’m tired of it, sick of it—­sick.”  She exhaled a breath, as if she were indeed physically ill.  Her face suggested it; her eyes were shadowed.  “Some Northern city, I suppose,” she added.

“And you want me to help you?” inquired Peter, puzzled.

She nodded silently, with a woman’s instinct to make a man guess the favor she is seeking.

Then it occurred to Peter just what sort of assistance the girl did want.  It gave him a faint shock that a girl could come to a man to beg or to borrow money.  It was a white man’s shock, a notion he had picked up in Boston, because it happens frequently among village negroes, and among them it holds as little significance as children begging one another for bites of apples.

Peter thought over his bank balance, then started toward a chest of drawers where he kept his checkbook.

“Cissie, if I can he of any service to you in a substantial way, I’ll be more than glad to—­”