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 were closed, and now as he entered he found his apartment flooded with sunshine and filled with that equable warmth that comes of straining sunbeams through glass.

He prepared for dinner with his mind still hovering about Cissie. He removed a book and a lamp from the lion-footed table, and drew up an old chair with which the Captain had furnished his room. It was a delicate old Heppelwhite of rosewood. It had lost a finial from one of its back standards, and a round was gone from the left side. Peter never moved the chair that vague plans sometime to repair it did not occur to him.

When he had cleared his table and placed his chair beside it, he wandered over to his tall west window and stood looking up the street through the brilliant sunshine, toward the Arkwright home. No one was in sight. In Hooker's Bend every one dines precisely at twelve, and at that hour the streets are empty. It would be some time before Cissie came back down the street on her way to Niggertown. She first would have to wash and put away the Arkwright dishes. It would be somewhere about one o'clock. Nevertheless, he kept staring out through the radiance of the autumn sunlight with an irrational feeling that she might appear at any moment. He was afraid she would slip past and he not see her at all. The thought disturbed him somewhat. It kept him sufficiently on the alert to stand tapping the balls of his fingers against