ed so sad. I couldn't be, because it was so much to know
what I knew.

"'If I can,' he says to me on the depot platform, 'dead or alive, I'll
come back some day to see you. But meanwhile you must forget me. Only
the dream--keep the dream,' he says.

"I tried to dream it again," Calliope told me, "but I never could. An'
dead or alive, he's never been back, all these years. I don't even know
his name--an' I remembered afterwards he hadn't asked me mine. But I
guess all that is the chance part, an' it don't really count. Out o' the
dream I've been, you might say, caught, tied up an' couldn't get
out,--just me, like you know me,--with a big unhappiness, an' like that.
But in the dream I dreamed myself true. An' then God let me meet myself,
just that once, there in the Depot Woods, to show me it's all right, an'
that they's things that's bigger than time an' lots nicer than life."

Calliope sat silent, with her way of sighing and looking by; and it was
as if she had suggested to me delicate things, as a rainbow will suggest
them.

XX

THE HIDINGS OF POWER

I divined the birches, blurred gray and white against the fog-bound
cedars. In the haze the airy trunks, because of their imminence, bore
the reality of thought, but the sterner green sank in the distance to
the faint avail of speech. It was well to be walking on the Plank Road
toward seven o'clock of a June morning, in a mist which might yield
fellowship in the same ease with which it breathed on distinctions.

Abel had told how, on that winter way of his among the hills, the sky
has fallen in the fog and had surrendered to him a fellowship of dreams.
But in Friendship Village, as I had often thought, there are dreams for
every one; how should it be otherwise to us faring up and down Daphne
Street (where Daphne's feet have been)? And yet that morning on the
Plank Road where, if the fancy seized her to walk in beauty, our lady of
the laurels might be met at any moment, her power seemed to me to be as
frail as wings, and I thought that it would not greatly matter if I were
to meet her.

As if my thought of Abel Halsey had brought him, the beat of hoofs won
toward me from the village; and presently Major Mary overtook me, and
there was Abel, driving with his eyes shut. I hailed him, laughed at
him, let him pick me up, and we went on through door after door of the
fog, with now a lintel of boughs and now a wall of wild roses.

"Abel," I remember saying abru