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 “To be exact,” proceeded the old man, with a vague fear still in his eyes, “I heard you were going to marry.”

“Marry!” This flaw took Peter's sails even more unexpectedly than the other. “Captain, who in the world—who could have told—”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“You aren't?”

“Indeed, no!”

“I heard you were going to marry a negress here in town called Cissie Dildine.” A question was audible in the silence that followed this statement. The obscure emotion that charged all the old man's queries affected Peter.

“I am not, Captain,” he declared earnestly; “that's settled.”

“Oh—you say it's settled,” picked up the old lawyer, delicately.

“Yes.”

“Then you had thought of it?” Immediately, however, he corrected this breach of courtesy into which his old legal habit of cross-questioning had led him. “Well, at any rate,” he said in quite another voice, “that eases my mind, Peter. It eases my mind. It was not only, Peter, the thought of losing you, but this girl you were thinking of marrying—let me warn you, Peter—she's a negress.”

The mulatto stared at the strange objection.

“A negress!”