a clear, sibilant note. The wind had died down
completely, and the raindrops fell in long, straight lines like an
opaque, glistening wall, which shut them off from the rest of the world.
Back of them, the fire lighted up the empty chair that Lydia had left.
She glanced in, and, moved by one of her sudden impulses, ran back for
a moment to cast a rapid glance about the quiet room.

When she returned to take Rankin's arm as he held the open umbrella, she
looked up at him with shining eyes. "I have made friends with it--your
living-room," she said.

As they made their way along the footpath, she went on, "When I get into
the trolley car I shall think I have dreamed it--the little house in the
clearing--so peaceful, so--just look at it now. It looks like a little
house in a child's fairy-tale." They paused on the edge of the clearing
and looked back at the pleasant glow shimmering through the windows,
then plunged into the strip of forest that separated the clearing from
the open farming country and the main road to Endbury.

Neither of them spoke during this walk. The rain pattered swiftly,
varying its monotonous refrain as it struck the umbrella, the leaves,
the little brook that ran beside them, or the stony path. Lydia clung to
Rankin's arm, peering about her into the dim caves of twilight with a
happy, secure excitement. After her confinement to the house for the
last fortnight, merely to be out of doors was an intoxication for her,
and ever since she had left her sister and begun her wanderings in the
painted woods she had felt the heroine of an impalpable adventure. The
silent flight through the dripping trees was a fitting end. Except for
breaking in upon the music of the rain, she would have liked to sing
aloud.

She thought, flittingly, how Marietta would laugh at her manufacturing
anything romantic out of the commonplace facts of the insignificant
episode, but even as she turned away from her sister's imagined mocking
smile, she felt an odd certainty that to Rankin there was also a glamour
about their doings. It was as though the occasional contact of their
bodies as they moved along the narrow path were a wordless
communication.

He said nothing, but as they emerged upon the long treeless road,
stretching away over the flat country to where the lights of Endbury
glowed tremulously through the rain, he looked at his companion with a
quick intensity, as though it were the first time he had really seen
her.