gin to drop in the early morning. Sleighs were moving to and
fro in the streets, and bright bits of color on the girls' hoods and in
the broad knit scarfs which the young men wore, formed pleasing reliefs
from the dazzling blue and white. Bells filled the air with jocund
music.

Bradley walked straight away into the country. He wanted to be alone.
It seemed so strange and sweet to be thus shaken by the coming of a
woman. In the first few minutes he gave himself up to the thought that
she was near and that he was going to hear her speak again. It made his
hand shake and his heart beat quick.

He wondered if she would be changed. She would be older a little, but
she would look just the same. He saw her stand again under the waving
branches of the oaks, the flickering shadow on her brown hair, speaking
again the words which had become the measure of his ambition, the
prophecy of a social condition:

"I want to have everything I do to help us all on toward that time when
the country will be filled with happy young people, and hale and hearty
old people, when the moon will be brighter, and the stars thicker in
the skies."

This was his thought. He had not risen yet to the conception of the
real barrenness and squalor of the life he had lived.

His studies had made him a little more self-analytical, but there were
inner deeps where he did not penetrate and there was one sacred place
which he dared not enter. A whirl of thought confused him, but out of
it all he returned constantly to the thought that he should hear her
speak again.

That evening he dressed himself with as much care as if he were to call
upon her alone, and he dressed very well now. His clothes were
substantial and fitted him well. His year's immunity from hard work had
left his large hands supple and delicate of touch, and his face had
attained refinement and mobility. His eyes had become more
introspective and had lost entirely the ox-like roll of the
country-born man. He was a handsome and dignified young man. His
bearing on the street was noticeably manly and unaffected.

The lecture was in the church and the seats were all filled. It
gratified him, at the same time that it hopelessly abased him to
observe all this evidence of her power. As he waited for her to appear
that tremor came into his hands again, and that breathlessness, and
curiously enough he felt that horrible familiar sinking of the heart
which he always felt just before he himself r