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 when a careful voice, a very careful voice, sounded in the outer room, gliding up politely on the syllables:

“Ahnt Carolin'! oh, Ahnt Carolin', may I enter?”

The old woman stirred.

“Da' 's Cissie, Peter. Go ast her in to de fambly-room.”

When Siner opened the door, the vague resemblance of the slender, creamy girl on the threshold to Ida May again struck him; but Cissie Dildine was younger, and her polished black hair lay straight on her pretty head, and was done in big, shining puffs over her ears in a way that Ida May's unruly curls would never have permitted. 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.

The girl carried a big package in her arms, and now she manipulated this to put out a slender hand to Peter.

“This is Cissie Dildine, Mister Siner.” She smiled up at him. “I just came over to put my name down on your list. There was such a mob at the Benevolence Hall last night I couldn't get to you.”

The girl had a certain finical precision to her English that told Peter she had been away to some school, and