As Peter stood there it seemed to him there was something symbolic in his attitude.  He was no longer of the black world; he was of the white.  He did not understand his people; they eluded him.

He belonged to the white world; not to the village across the hill, but to the North.  Nothing now prevented him from going North and taking the position with Farquhar.  Cissie Dildine was impossible for him now.  Niggertown was immovable, at least for him.  He was no Washington to lead his people to a loftier plane.  In fact, Peter began to suspect that he was no leader at all.  He saw now that his initial success with the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence had been effected merely by the aura of his college training.  After his first misstep he had never rehabilitated himself.  He perhaps had a dash of the artistic in him, and the power to mold ideas often confuses itself subjectively with the power to mold human beings.  In reality he did not even understand the people he assumed to mold.  A suspicion came to him that under the given conditions their ways were more rational than his own.

As for Cissie Dildine, his duty by the girl, his queer protective passion for her—­all that was surely past now.  After her lapse from all decency there was no reason why he should spend another thought on her.  He would go North to Chicago.

The last of the twilight was fading in swift, visible gradations of light.  The cedars, the cabins, and the hill faded in pulse-beats of darkness.  Above the Big Hill the last ember of day smoldered against a green-blue infinity.  Here and there a star pricked the dome with a wintry brilliance.

Then, somehow, the thought of Cissie looking out on that chilly sky through iron bars tightened Peter’s throat.  He caught himself up sharply for his emotion.  He began a vague defense of the white man’s laws on grounds as cold and impersonal as the winter evening.  Laws, customs, and conventions were for the strengthening of men, to seed the select, to winnow the weak.  It was white logic, applied firmly, as by a white man.  But somehow the stars multiplied and kept Cissie’s image before Peter—­a cold, frightened girl, harassed with coming motherhood, peering at those chill, distant lights out of the blackness of a jail.

The mulatto decided to spend the night in his mother’s cabin.  He would do his packing, and be ready for the down-river boat in the morning.  He found his way to his own gate in the darkness.  He lifted it around, entered, and walked to his door.  When he tried to open it, he found some one had bored holes through the shutter and the jamb and had wired it shut.

Peter struck a match to see just what had been done.  The flame displayed a small sheet tacked on the door.  He spent two matches investigating it.  It was a notice of levy, posted by the constable in an action of debt brought against the estate of Caroline Siner by Henry Hooker.  The owner of the estate and the public in general were warned against removing anything whatsoever from the premises under penalty exacted by the law governing such offenses.  Then Peter untwisted the wire and entered.