s.
When she opened them again the sun was shining.

She started up nervously, still under the influence of a vivid
dream--strange.... Then as she blinked and rubbed her eyes she saw her
mother standing by the bed, with a pale, composed face.

"It's nine o'clock, Sylvia," she said, "and Mr. Fiske is downstairs,
asking to see you. He tells me that you and he are engaged to be
married."

Sylvia was instantly wide awake. "Oh no! Oh no!" she said
passionately. "No, we're not! I won't be! I won't see him!" She
looked about her wildly, and added, "I'll write him that--just wait a
minute." She sprang out of bed, caught up a pad of paper, and wrote
hastily: "It was all a mistake--I don't care for you at all--not a
bit! I hope I shall never have to speak to you again." "There," she
said, thrusting it into her mother's hands. She stood for a moment,
shivering in her thin nightgown in the icy draught, and then jumped
back into bed again.

Her mother came back in a few moments, closed the windows, and opened
the register. There was not in her silence or in a line of her quiet
presence the faintest hint of curiosity about Sylvia's actions.
She had always maintained in theory, and now at this crisis with
characteristic firmness of purpose acted upon her theory, that
absolutely unforced confidence was the only kind worth having, and
that moreover, unless some help was necessary, it might be as well for
the younger generation early to acquire the strengthening capacity to
keep its own intimate experiences to the privacy of its own soul,
and learn to digest them and feed upon them without the dubiously
peptonizing aid of blundering adult counsel. Sylvia watched her mother
with wondering gratitude. She wasn't going to ask! She was going to
let Sylvia shut that ghastly recollection into the dark once for
all. She wasn't going by a look or a gesture to force her helplessly
responsive child to give, by words, weight and substance to a black,
shapeless horror from which Sylvia with a vivid impulse of sanity
averted her eyes.

She got out of bed and put her arms around her mother's neck. "Say,
Mother, you are _great_!" she said in an unsteady voice. Mrs. Marshall
patted her on the back.

"You'd better go and take your bath, and have your breakfast," she
said calmly. "Judith and Lawrence have gone skating."

When Sylvia, tingling with the tonic shock of cold water and rough
toweling, and rosy in her old blue sailor-suit, came downstai