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It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse's. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn't we?" He appealed to Lucy. "There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased.
"Good night," and she disappeared in the dark space she had opened, and closed the jalousies softly after her. Cissie Dildine's conviction that marriage would cure Peter of his mission persisted in the mulatto's mind long after the glamour of the girl had faded and his room had regained the bleak emptiness of a bachelor's bedchamber.
As for Cissie Dildine, his duty by the girl, his queer protective passion for her all that was surely past now. After her lapse from all decency there was no reason why he should spend another thought on her. He would go North to Chicago. The last of the twilight was fading in swift, visible gradations of light. The cedars, the cabins, and the hill faded in pulse-beats of darkness.
At first he put it down to mere niggerish taste, and his dislike for the girl edged his stricture; then, on second thought, the oddness of sumac for a nosegay caught his attention. Nobody used sumac for a buttonhole. He had never heard of any woman, white or black, using sumac for a bouquet. Why should this Cissie Dildine trig herself out in sumac?
"I'm not the only American who has gone Canadian for the duration of the war." He had got to his explanation at last. "I've told a lie," he said triumphantly. "I've shifted my birthplace six hundred miles. "Mind you, I don't admit a thing that Cissie has ever said about America not one thing. You don't understand the sort of proposition America is up against.
Why Captain Renfrew had selected him as a secretary and companion Peter could not fancy. The magnificence of his surroundings revived his late dream of a honeymoon with Cissie. Certainly, in his fancy, he had visioned a honeymoon in Pullman parlor cars and suburban bungalows. He had been mistaken. This great chamber rose about him like a corrected proof of his desire.
And in the meanwhile the other riddle resolved itself. He had had a certain idea in his mind for some time. He discovered one day that it was an inspiration. He could keep his conscientious objection about America, and still take a line that would satisfy Cissie. He took it.
She was startled, therefore, when Cicely herself, who was always supposed to be much calmer than Merry, and less vehement in her desires, clasped her sister's hand and said with emphasis, "I don't know, after all, if it is good for us to see too much of Maggie Howland." "Why, Cissie? What do you mean?" "I mean this," said Cicely: "she makes me yes, I will say it discontented."
Their talk drifted back to Peter's mission here in Hooker's Bend, and Cissie was saying: "The trouble is, Peter, we are out of our milieu." Some portion of Peter's brain that was not basking in the warmth and invitation of the girl answered quite logically: "Yes, but if I could help these people, Cissie, reconstruct our life here culturally " Cissie shook her head. "Not culturally."
Her eyes were the most limpid brown Peter had ever seen, but her oval face was faintly unnatural from the use of negro face powder, which colored women insist on, and which gives their yellows and browns a barely perceptible greenish hue. Cissie wore a fluffy yellow dress some three shades deeper than the throat and the glimpse of bosom revealed at the neck.
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