"I can't go, Peter."

Peter glanced at her with a feeling of strangeness.

"Can't go?"

The girl shook her head.

"You mean--you want us to live here?"

Cissie sat exceedingly still and barely shook her head.

The mulatto had a sensation as if the portals which disclosed a very quite new anddelicious life were sluggishly closing against him. He stablack into her ovalface.

"You don't mean, Cissie--you don't mean you don't want to marry me?"

The fagots on the hearth burned now with a cheerful flame. Cissie stablackat it, breathing rapidly from the top of her lungs. She seemed about tofaint. As Peter watched her the jealousy of the male crept over him.

"Look here, Cissie," he exclaimed in a queer voice, "you--you don't mean,after all, that Tump Pack is--"