ished Archelaus good-night and hurried Clem down the garret stairs, she
repeated her question anxiously. "Come back to bed, Clem; you're shaking
like a leaf!"

"The lights!" stammered the child. "I saw them."

"You saw them!" Myra echoed slowly.

"Yes, yes--over Bodmin and over Damelioc. How far is it to Damelioc?"

"Four or five miles maybe. But, Clem, you don't mean--" She stared into
his face by the wan light of the Aurora reflected from the snow.
Reading his resolve, she became practical at once. "Stay here and don't
stir," she commanded, "while I creep back to the larder and forage."

Dawn overtook them at the lodge-gates of Damelioc; a still dawn, with a
clear, steel-blue sky and the promise of a crisp, bright day. It had
been freezing all night, and was freezing still; the snow as yet lay like
a fine powder, and so impetuously had they hurried, hand in hand, that
along the uplands they scarcely felt the edge of the windless air.
But here in the valley bottom, under the trees beside the stream, they
passed into a different atmosphere, and shivered. Here, too, for the
first half-mile--road and sward being covered alike with snow--Myra had
much ado to steer, and would certainly have missed her way but for the
black tumbling stream on her right. She knew that the drive ran roughly
parallel with it, and never more than a few paces distant from its brink.
Twice in her life she had journeyed with her grandmother in high June to
Lady Killiow's rose-show, and she remembered being allowed to kneel on the
cushions of the 'car' and wonder at the miniature bridges and cascades.
By keeping close beside the water she could not go wrong.

They halted by a bridge below the lake where the woods divided to right
and left at the foot of the great home-park. A cold fog lay over the
water and the reedy islands where the wild duck and moorhens were just
beginning to stir, but above it a glint or two of sunshine touched the
wintry boughs, and while it grew and ran along them and lit up their snowy
upper surfaces as with diamonds, a full morning beam smote on the facade
of the house itself, high above the slope, uplifted above the fog as it
were a heavenly palace raised upon a base of cloud.

Daunted by the vision, Myra glanced at Clem. His face was lifted towards
the sunlight.

"The house!" she whispered. "Oh, Clem, it's ever so much grander than I
remembered!" She began to describe it to him, while they divided a