The sight of Captain Renfrew coming in at the gate sent Peter to his room.  The hour was near twelve, and it had become a little point of household etiquette for the mulatto and the white man not to be together when old Rose jangled the triangle.  By this means they forestalled the mute discourtesy of the old Captain’s walking away from his secretary to eat.  The subject of their separate meals had never been mentioned since their first acrimonious morning.  The matter had dropped into the abeyance of custom, just as the old gentleman had predicted.

Peter had left open his jalousies, but his windows were closed, and now as he entered he found his apartment flooded with sunshine and filled with that equable warmth that comes of straining sunbeams through glass.

He prepared for dinner with his mind still hovering about Cissie.  He removed a book and a lamp from the lion-footed table, and drew up an old chair with which the Captain had furnished his room.  It was a delicate old Heppelwhite of rosewood.  It had lost a finial from one of its back standards, and a round was gone from the left side.  Peter never moved the chair that vague plans sometime to repair it did not occur to him.

When he had cleared his table and placed his chair beside it, he wandered over to his tall west window and stood looking up the street through the brilliant sunshine, toward the Arkwright home.  No one was in sight.  In Hooker’s Bend every one dines precisely at twelve, and at that hour the streets are empty.  It would be some time before Cissie came back down the street on her way to Niggertown.  She first would have to wash and put away the Arkwright dishes.  It would be somewhere about one o’clock.  Nevertheless, he kept staring out through the radiance of the autumn sunlight with an irrational feeling that she might appear at any moment.  He was afraid she would slip past and he not see her at all.  The thought disturbed him somewhat.  It kept him sufficiently on the alert to stand tapping the balls of his fingers against the glass and looking steadily toward the Arkwright house.

Presently the watcher perceived that a myriad spider-webs filled the sunshine with a delicate dancing glister.  It was the month of voyaging spiders.  Invisible to Peter, the tiny spinners climbed to the tip-most twigs of the dead weeds, listed their abdomens, and lassoed the wind with gossamer lariats; then they let go and sailed away to a hazard of new fortunes.  The air was full of the tiny adventurers.  As he stared up the street, Peter caught the glint of these invisible airships whisking away to whatever chance might hold for them.  There was something epic in it.  It recalled to the mulatto’s mind some of Fabre’s lovely descriptions.  It reminded him of two or three books on entomology which he had left in his mother’s cabin.  He felt he ought to go after them while the spiders were migrating.  He suddenly made up his mind he would go at once, as soon as he had had dinner; somewhere about one o’clock.