h his tainted body
and brain to the undefiled child-soul. The stars blazed awfully for
Dickie, and the mountains were awfully white and high, and the air
shattered against his spirit like a crystal sword. He stood for an
instant as though on a single point of solid earth and looked giddily
beyond earthly barriers.

His lips began to move. He was trying to put that mystery, that
emotion, into words ... "It's white," he murmured, "and
sharp--burning--like--like"--his fancy fumbled--"like the inside of a
cold flame." He shook his head. That did not describe the marvelous
quality of the night. And yet--if the world had gone up to heaven in a
single, streaming point of icy fire and a fellow stood in it, frozen,
swept up out of a fellow's body.... Again he shook his head and his eyes
were possessed by the wistful, apologetic smile. He wished he were not
tormented by this queer need of describing his sensations. He remembered
very vividly one of the many occasions when it had roused his father's
anger. Dickie, standing with his hand against the cold bricks of The
Aura, smiled with his lips, not happily, but with a certain amusement,
thinking of how Sylvester's hand had cracked against his cheek and sent
all his thoughts flying like broken china. He had been apologizing for
his slowness over an errand--something about leaves, it had been--the
leaves of those aspens in the yard--he had told his father that they had
been little green flames--he had stopped to look at them.

"You damn fool!" Sylvester had said as he struck.

"You damn fool!" Once, when a stranger asked five-year-old Dickie his
name, he had answered innocently "Dickie-damn-fool!"

"They'll probably put it on my tombstone," Dickie concluded, and, stung
by the cold, he shrank into his coat and stumbled round the corner of the
street. The reek of spirits trailed behind him through the purity like a
soiled rag.

Number 18 Cottonwood Avenue was brilliantly lighted. Girlie was playing
the piano, Babe's voice, "sassing Poppa," was audible from one end to the
other of the empty street. Her laughter slapped the air. Dickie
hesitated. He was afraid of them all--of Sylvester's pensive, small,
brown eyes and hard, long hands, of Babe's bodily vigor, of Girlie's mild
contemptuous look, of his mother's gloomy, furtive tenderness. Dickie
felt a sort of aching and compassionate dread of the rough, awkward
caress of her big red hand against his cheek. As he hesitated, the door