tion of the calendar; yet there was no public sentiment against it. Peter wondered how this attitude of his whole people could possibly be.
With the query the memory of Ida May came back to him, with its sense of dim pathos. It seemed to Peter now as if their young and uninstructed hands had destroyed a safety-vault to filch a penny.
The reflex of a thought of Ida May always brought Peter to Cissie; it always stirred up in him a desire to make this young girl's path gentle and smooth. There was a fineness, a delicacy about Cissie, that, it seemed to Peter, Ida May had never possessed. Then, too, Cissie was moved by a passion for self-betterment. She deserved a cleaner field than the Niggertown of Hooker's Bend.
Peter took Parson Ranson's arm, and the two moved to the gate by common consent. It was no longer pleasant to sit here. The quarrel they had heard somehow had flavored their surroundings.
Peter turned his steps mechanically northward up the crescent toward the Dildine cabin. Nothing now restrained him from calling on Cissie; he would keep no dinner waiting; he would not be warned and berated on his return home. The nagging, jealous love of his mother had ended.
As the two men walked along, it was borne in upon Peter that his mother's death definitely ended one period of his life. There was no reason why he should continue his present unsettled existence. It seemed
