The girl paused in her sobbing at his even, passionless voice.

“Then you—­you won’t?” she whispered in her arms.

“I can’t, Cissie.”  Now that he was saying it, he uttered the words very evenly and smoothly.  “I can’t, dear Cissie, because a great work has just come into my life.”  He paused, expecting her to ask some question, but she lay silent, with her face in her arms, evidently listening.

“Cissie, I think, in fact I know, I can demonstrate to all the South, both white and black, the need of a better and more sincere understanding between our two races.”

Peter did not feel the absurdity of such a speech in such a place.  He patted her arm, but there was something in the warmth of her flesh that disturbed his austerity and caused him to lift his hand to the more impersonal axis of her shoulder.  He proceeded to develop his idea.

“Cissie, just a moment ago you were complaining of the insults you meet everywhere.  I believe if I can spread my ideas, Cissie, that even a pretty colored girl like you may walk the streets without being subjected to obscenity on every corner.”  His tone unconsciously patronized Cissie’s prettiness with the patronage of the male for the less significant thing, as though her ripeness for love and passion and children were, after all, not comparable with what he, a male, could do in the way of significantly molding life.

Cissie lifted her head and dried her eyes.

“So you aren’t going to marry me, Peter?” Woman-like, now that she was well into the subject, she was far less embarrassed than Peter.  She had had her cry.

“Why—­er—­considering this work, Cissie—­”

“Aren’t you going to marry anybody, Peter?”

The artist in Peter, the thing the girl loved in him, caught again that Messianic vision of himself.

“Why, no, Cissie,” he said, with a return of his inspiration of an hour ago; “I’ll be going here and there all over the South preaching this gospel of kindliness and tolerance, of forgiveness of the faults of others.”  Cissie looked at him with a queer expression.  “I’ll show the white people that they should treat the negro with consideration not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of themselves.  It’s so simple, Cissie, it’s so logical and clear—­”

The girl shook her head sadly.

“And you don’t want me to go with you, Peter?”

“Why, n-no, Cissie; a girl like you couldn’t go.  Perhaps I’ll be misunderstood in places, perhaps I may have to leave a town hurriedly, or be swung over the walls, like Paul, in a basket.”  He attempted to treat it lightly.

But the girl looked at him with a horror dawning in her melancholy face.

“Peter, do you really mean that?” she whispered.

“Why, truly.  You don’t imagine—­”

The octoroon opened her dark eyes until she might have been some weird.