With a certain feeling of clumsiness Peter groped in the dark hall for his hat, then, as quietly as he could, let himself out at the door.  Outside he was surprised to find that daylight still lingered in the sky.  He thought night had fallen.  The sun lay behind the Big Hill, but its red rays pouring down through the boles of the cedars tinted long delicate avenues in the dusty atmosphere above his head.  A sharp chill in the air presaged frost for the night.  Somewhere in the crescent a boy yodeled for his dog at about half-minute intervals, with the persistence of children.

Peter walked a little distance, but finally came to a stand in the dust, looking at the negro cabins, not knowing where to go or what to do.  Cissie’s confession had destroyed all his plans.  It had left him as adynamic as had his mother’s death.  It seemed to Peter that there was a certain similarity between the two events; both were sudden and desolating.  And just as his mother had vanished utterly from his reach, so now it seemed Cissie was no more.  Cissie the clear-eyed, Cissie the ambitious, Cissie the refined, had vanished away, and in her place stood a thief.

The thing was grotesque.  Peter began a sudden shuddering in the cold.  Then he began moving toward the empty cabin where he slept and kept his things.  He moved along, talking to himself in the dusty emptiness of the crescent.  He decided that he would go home, pack his clothes, and vanish.  A St. Louis boat would be down that night, and he would just have time to pack his clothes and catch it.  He would not take his books, his philosophies.  He would let them remain, in the newspapered room, until all crumbled into uniform philosophic dust, and the teachings of Aristotle blew about Niggertown.

Then, as he thought of traveling North, the vision of the honeymoon he had just planned revived his numb brain into a dismal aching.  He looked back through the dusk at the Dildine roof.  It stood black against an opalescent sky.  Out of the foreground, bending over it, arose a clump of tall sunflowers, in whose silhouette hung a suggestion of yellow and green.  The whole scene quivered slightly at every throb of his heart.  He thought what a fool he was to allow a picaresque past to keep him away from such a woman, how easy it would be to go back to the soft luxury of Cissie, to tell her it made no difference; and somehow, just at that moment it seemed not to.

Then the point of view which Peter had been four years acquiring swept away the impulse, and it left him moving toward his cabin again, empty, cold, and planless.

He was drawn out of his reverie by the soft voice of a little negro boy asking him apprehensively whom he was talking to.

Peter stopped, drew forth a handkerchief and dabbed the moisture from his cold face in the meticulous fashion of college men.

With the boy came a dog which was cautiously smelling Peter’s shoes and trousers.  Both boy and dog were investigating the phenomenon of Peter.  Peter, in turn, looked down at them with a feeling that they had materialized out of nothing.