"It--it's about Cissie Dildine," the old lawyer hurried on.
The old man lifted a thin hand as if to touch Peter's arm, but he did not. A sort of desperation seized him.
"But listen, Peter, you don't want to do--what's in your mind!"
"I mean marry a negress. You don't want to marry a negress!"
"No, Peter; no," quavered the old man. "For yourself it may make no difference, but your children--think of your children, your son growing up under a brown veil! You can't tear it off. God himself can't tear it off! You can never reach him through it. Your children, your children's children, a terrible procession that stretches out and out, marching under a black shroud, unknowing, unknown! All you can see are their sad forms beneath the shroud, marching away--marching away. God knows where! And yet it's your own flesh and blood!"
Suddenly the old lawyer's face broke into the hard, tearless contortions of the aged. His terrible emotion communicated itself to the sensitive brown man.
"But, Captain, I myself am a negro. Whom should I marry?"
"No one; no one! Let your seed wither in your loins! It's better to do that; it's better--" At that moment the clashing of the supper gong fell on the old man's naked nerves. He straightened up by some reflex mechanism, turned away from what he thought was his last interview with his secretary, and proceeded down the piazza into the great empty dining-room.
With overwrought nerves Peter Siner entered his room. At five o'clock that afternoon he had seen Cissie Dildine go up the street to the Arkwright home to cook one of those occasional suppers. He had been watching for her return, and in the midst of it the Captain's extraordinary outburst had stirred him up.
Once in his room, the negro placed the broken Hepplewhite in such a position that he could rake the street with a glance. Then he tried to compose himself and await the coming of his supper and the passage of Cissie. There was something almost pathetic in Peter's endless watching, all for a mere glimpse or two of the girl in yellow. He himself had no idea how his nerves and thoughts had woven themselves around the young woman. He had no idea what a passion this continual doling out of glimpses had begotten. He did not dream how much he was, as folk naïvely put it, in love with her.