.

She found it natural that the light should be temporarily removed from
his firmament while she should be at boarding-school, and yet in the
tenderness of her heart she pitied him. She put her hands impulsively
upon his shoulders as he stood looking at her with that queer expression
which he believed to be a smile.

"Peter, you dear old thing, indeed I shall miss you! I don't know what I
shall do without you, and I'll write to you every single week."

Gently he disengaged her arms. They were standing under that which, for
courtesy's sake, had always been called the chandelier. It was in the
centre of the parlour, and Uncle Tom always covered it with holly and
mistletoe at Christmas.

"Why do you say I'll never come back?" asked Honora. "Of course I shall
come back, and live here all the rest of my life."

Peter shook his head slowly. He had recovered something of his customary
quizzical manner.

"The East is a strange country," he said. "The first thing we know
you'll be marrying one of those people we read about, with more millions
than there are cars on the Olive Street line."

Honora was a little indignant.

"I wish you wouldn't talk so, Peter," she said. "In the first place, I
shan't see any but girls at Sutcliffe. I could only see you for a few
minutes once a week if you were there. And in the second place, it isn't
exactly--Well--dignified to compare the East and the West the way you
do, and speak about people who are very rich and live there as though
they were different from the people we know here. Comparisons, as
Shakespeare said, are odorous."

"Honora," he declared, still shaking his head, "you're a fraud, but I
can't help loving you."

For a long time that night Honora lay in bed staring into the darkness,
and trying to realize what had happened. She heard the whistling and the
puffing of the trains in the cinder-covered valley to the southward, but
the quality of these sounds had changed. They were music now.

CHAPTER VI. HONORA HAS A GLIMPSE OF THE WORLD

It is simply impossible to give any adequate notion of the industry of
the days that followed. No sooner was Uncle Tom out of the house in the
morning than Anne Rory marched into the sitting-room and took command,
and turned it, into a dressmaking establishment. Anne Rory, who deserves
more than a passing mention, one of the institutions of Honora's youth,
who sewed for the first families, and knew much more about them than Mr.
Mee