he slow, sweet laugh rippled
out--"Molly is mighty afraid of me."

Then Sandy managed to command his thought and motions. He stepped to
Cynthia and knelt beside her.

"I am going away," he said softly.

"Yes, I know. When?"

"To-night."

"To-night?" Fourteen and twelve have no perspective--everything is
final and vital to them. The past has been but a witchery of
preparation in a fairy tale of wonder and delight; the actual
experience of action found them both unfitted for the ordeal, but in
each boy and girl is the potential man and woman, and Sandy and Cynthia
met the present moment characteristically.

"I dreamed two dreams," said the girl with a shade of mysticism in her
tones. "Once I saw you going down The Way, Sandy, with the look on
your face that you now have. I stood by the big pine just where the
trail ends in The Way, and watched you. Then I dreamed last night that
I stood by the big pine again and you were coming up The Way a-waving
to me like you knew I would be there. There was a look on your face--a
new look--but I knew it, for I've seen it before in the Significant
Room." Cynthia paused, for the question in Sandy's eyes held her.

"You know my story?" she said with her delicious laugh thrilling her
listener; "the story part of my life?"

"Oh!" It came to Sandy then, in this strained, prosaic moment, the
memory of Cynthia's fancy to set her little world in the frame of her
"Pilgrim's Progress," the only book of fiction free to her. "Oh! yes,
now I remember."

"Sandy, all these years I have tried and tried to make you fit in--but
you wouldn't until--until last night. When it was right dark and still
and everybody was sleeping, I went down into the old library--that's
where Aunt Ann had the queer spell the day Miss Lowe came--the room is
all dirty and full of ashes, for the chimney fell that afternoon; but
right beside the fireplace there is an empty space on the wall that
I've always saved for you!"

Cynthia had forgot the present in her fantastic play and she held Sandy
as she always had before by the trick of her fascination.

"Yes," he murmured; "there is your mother's picture and the old
general's and the frame that holds your father's portrait--the father
that no one knows about but you--and now--am I hanging in the
Significant Room?"

Sandy was all boy now; the strange new dignity fell wearily from
him--he was playing, after a hard lesson, with little Cyn.

"And what am