When Cissie Dildine came to the surface of Peter’s mind she remained there, whirling around and around in his chaotic thoughts.  He began talking to her image, after a certain dramatic trick of his mind, and she began offering her environment as an excuse for what had come between them and estranged them.  She stole, but she had been trained to steal.  She was a thief, the victim of an immense immorality.  The charm of Cissie, her queer, swift-working intuition, the candor of her confession, her voluptuousness—­all came rushing down on Peter, harassing him with anger and love and desire.  To copy any more script became impossible.  He lost his place; he hardly knew what he was writing.

He flung aside the whole work, got to his feet with the imperative need of an athlete for the open.  He started out of the room, but as an afterthought scribbled a nervous line, telling the Captain he might not be back for dinner.  Then he found his hat and coat and walked briskly around the piazza to the front gate.

The trees and shrubs were dripping, but the fog had almost cleared away, leaving only a haze in the air.  A pale, level line of it cut across the scarp of the Big Hill.  The sun shone with a peculiar soft light through the vapors.

As Peter passed out at the gate, the fancy came to him that he might very well be starting on his mission.  It came with a sort of surprise.  He wondered how other men had set about reforms.  With unpremeditation?  He wondered to whom Jesus of Nazareth preached his first sermon.  The thought of that young Galilean, sensitive, compassionate, inexperienced, speaking to his first hearer, filled Peter with a strange trembling tenderness.  He looked about the familiar street of Hooker’s Bend, the old trees over the pavement, the shabby village houses, and it all held a strangeness when thus juxtaposed to the thought of Nazareth nineteen hundred years before.

The mulatto started down the street with his footsteps quickened by a sense of spiritual adventure.

CHAPTER XVI

On the corner, against the blank south wall of Hobbett’s store, Peter Siner saw the usual crowd of negroes warming themselves in the soft sunshine.  They were slapping one another, scuffling, making feints with knives or stones, all to an accompaniment of bragging, profanity, and loud laughter.  Their behavior was precisely that of adolescent white boys of fifteen or sixteen years of age.

Jim Pink Staggs was furnishing much amusement with an impromptu sleight-of-hand exhibition.  The black audience clustered around Jim Pink in his pinstripe trousers and blue-serge coat.  They exhibited not the least curiosity as to the mechanics of the tricks, but asked for more and still more, with the naive delight of children in the mysterious.

Peter Siner walked down the street with his Messianic impulse strong upon him.  He was in that stage of feeling toward his people where a man’s emotions take the color of religion.  Now, as he approached the crowd of negroes, he wondered what he could say, how he could transfer to them the ideas and the emotion that lifted up his own heart.