mers. Up Bolingbroke Street a
faint breeze blew, lifting the moist satin-like hair on Mrs. Pendleton's
forehead. Already its ancient dignity had deserted the quarter in which
the Treadwells lived, and it had begun to wear a forsaken and injured
look, as though it resented the degradation of commerce into which it
had descended.

"I can't understand why Cyrus Treadwell doesn't move over to Sycamore
Street," remarked John Henry after a moment of reflection in which he
had appeared to weigh this simple sentence with scrupulous exactness.
"He's rich enough, I suppose, to buy anything he wants."

"I've heard Susan say that it was her mother's old home and she didn't
care to leave it," said Mrs. Pendleton.

"I don't believe it's that a bit," broke in Virginia with characteristic
impulsiveness. "The only reason is that Mr. Treadwell is stingy. With
all his money, I know Mrs. Treadwell and Susan hardly ever have a dollar
they can spend on themselves."

Though she spoke with her accustomed energy, she was conscious all the
time that the words she uttered were not the ones in her thoughts. What
did Cyrus Treadwell's stinginess matter when his only relation to life
consisted in his being the uncle of Oliver? It was as if a single shape
moved alive through a universe peopled with shadows. Only a borrowed
radiance attached itself now to the persons and objects that had
illumined the world for her yesterday. Yet she approached the crisis of
her life so silently that those around her did not recognize it beneath
the cover of ordinary circumstances. Like most great moments it had come
unheralded; and though the rustling of its wings filled her soul,
neither her mother nor John Henry heard a stir in the quiet air that
surrounded them. Walking between the two who loved her, she felt that
she was separated from them both by an eternity of experience.

There were several blocks of Bolingbroke Street to walk before the
Treadwells' house was reached, and as they sauntered slowly past decayed
dwellings, Virginia's imagination ran joyously ahead of her to the
meeting. Would it happen this time as it had happened before when he
looked at her that something would pass between them which would make
her feel that she belonged to him? So little resistance did she offer to
the purpose of Life that she seemed to have existed from the beginning
merely as an exquisite medium for a single emotion. It was as if the
dreams of all the dead women of he