“Oh, Peter, please, please put such a mad idea away from you!  Peter, you’ve been living here alone in this old house until you don’t see things clearly.  Dear Peter, don’t you know? You can’t go out and talk like that to white folks and—­and not have some terrible thing happen to you!  Oh, Peter, if you would only marry me, it would cure you of such wildness!” Involuntarily she got up, holding out her arms to him, offering herself to his needs, with her frightened eyes fixed on his.

It made him exquisitely uncomfortable again.  He made a little sound designed to comfort and reassure her.  He would do very well.  He was something of a diplomat in his way.  He had got along with the boys in Harvard very well indeed.  In fact, he was rather a man of the world.  No need to worry about him, though it was awfully 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.