It was an extraordinary idea, an explosive idea, such as Cissie seemed to have the faculty of touching off.  He sat staring at her.

It was the white blood in his own veins that had sent him struggling up North, that had brought him back with this flame in his heart for his own people.  It was the white blood in Cissie that kept her struggling to stand up, to speak an unbroken tongue, to gather around her the delicate atmosphere and charm of a gentlewoman.  It was the Caucasian in them buried here in Niggertown.  It was their part of the tragedy of millions of mixed blood in the South.  Their common problem, a feeling of their joint isolation, brought Peter to a sense of keen and tingling nearness to the girl.

She was talking again, very earnestly, almost tremulously: 

“Why don’t you go North, Peter?  I think and think about you staying here.  You simply can’t grow up and develop here.  And now, especially, when everybody doubts you.  If you’d go North—­”

“What about you, Cissie?  You say we’re together—­”

“Oh, I’m a woman.  We haven’t the chance to do as we will.”

A kind of titillation went over Peter’s scalp and body.

“Then you are going to stay here and marry—­Tump?” He uttered the name in a queer voice.

Tears started in Cissie’s eyes; her bosom lifted to her quick breathing.

“I—­I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she stammered miserably.

Peter leaned over her with a drumming heart; he heard her catch her breath.

“You don’t care for Tump?” he asked with a dry mouth.

She gasped out something, and the next moment Peter felt her body sink limply in his groping arms.  They clung together closely, quiveringly.  Three nights of vigil, each thinking miserably and wistfully of the other, had worn the nerves of both man and girl until they were ready to melt together at a touch.  Her soft body clinging to his own, the little nervous pressures of her arms, her eased breathing at his neck, wiped away Siner’s long sense of strain.  Strength and peace seemed to pour from her being into his by a sort of spiritual osmosis.  She resigned her head to his palm in order that he might lift her lips to his when he pleased.  After all, there is no way for a man to rest without a woman.  All he can do is to stop work.

For a long time they sat transported amid the dusty honeysuckles and withered blooms, but after a while they began talking a little at a time of the future, their future.  They felt so indissolubly joined that they could not imagine the future finding them apart.  There was no need for any more trouble with Tump Pack.  They would marry quietly, and go away North to live.  Peter thought of his friend Farquhar.  He wondered if Farquhar’s attitude would be just the same toward Cissie as it was toward him.

“North,” was the burden of the octoroon’s dreams.  They would go North to Chicago.  There were two hundred and fifty thousand negroes in Chicago, a city within itself three times the size of Nashville.  Up North she and Peter could go to theaters, art galleries, could enter any church, could ride in street-cars, railroad-trains, could sleep and eat at any hotel, live authentic lives.