“Noble—­”

“Yes.  You know,” he went on a little quickly, “sometimes I—­I’ve thought my father must have been a noble man.”

The old negress became very still.  She was not looking quite at her son, or yet precisely away from him.

“Uh—­uh noble nigger,”—­she gave her abdominal chuckle.  “Why—­yeah, I reckon yo’ father wuz putty noble as—­as niggers go.”  She sat looking at her son, oddly, with a faint amusement in her gross black face, when a careful voice, a very careful voice, sounded in the outer room, gliding up politely on the syllables: 

“Ahnt Carolin’! oh, Ahnt Carolin’, may I enter?”

The old woman stirred.

“Da’’s Cissie, Peter.  Go ast her in to de fambly-room.”

When Siner opened the door, the vague resemblance of the slender, creamy girl on the threshold to Ida May again struck him; but Cissie Dildine was younger, and her polished black hair lay straight on her pretty head, and was done in big, shining puffs over her ears in a way that Ida May’s unruly curls would never have permitted.  Her eyes were the most limpid brown Peter had ever seen, but her oval face was faintly unnatural from the use of negro face powder, which colored women insist on, and which gives their yellows and browns a barely perceptible greenish hue.  Cissie wore a fluffy yellow dress some three shades deeper than the throat and the glimpse of bosom revealed at the neck.

The girl carried a big package in her arms, and now she manipulated this to put out a slender hand to Peter.

“This is Cissie Dildine, Mister Siner.”  She smiled up at him.  “I just came over to put my name down on your list.  There was such a mob at the Benevolence Hall last night I couldn’t get to you.”

The girl had a certain finical precision to her English that told Peter she had been away to some school, and had been taught to guard her grammar very carefully as she talked.

Peter helped her inside amid the handshake and said he would go fetch the list.  As he turned, Cissie offered her bundle.  “Here is something I thought might be a little treat for you and Ahnt Carolin’.”  She paused, and then explained remotely, “Sometimes it is hard to get good things at the village market.”

Peter took the package, vaguely amused at Cissie’s patronage of the Hooker’s Bend market.  It was an attitude instinctively assumed by every girl, white or black, who leaves the village and returns.  The bundle was rather large and wrapped in newspapers.  He carried it into the kitchen to his mother, and then returned with the list.

The sheet was greasy from the handling of black fingers.  The girl spread it on the little center-table with a certain daintiness, seated herself, and held out her hand for Peter’s pencil.  She made rather a graceful study in cream and yellow as she leaned over the table and signed her name in a handwriting as perfect and as devoid of character as a copy-book.  She began discussing the speech Peter had made at the Benevolence Hall.