e plenty of the other kind. He felt disgust as he
remembered with whom he had already chaffed and dallied, but only by
chance would he be likely to meet such a young woman as Hertha Ogilvie.
Setting his hat firmly on his head and pulling on his gloves, he said to
himself that he was glad she was so careful but that he must find some
way of breaking through her reserve.

A snowball struck him in the neck, and turning he found his new boy
acquaintance grinning at him. Here was a time to take off, not to put
on, the gloves. Stripping himself of impediments, he entered upon his
first snowball fight to emerge wet but triumphant.

Hertha walked west for a few blocks, then north, then back to the east
again. She meant to go to church, but she did not mean that Richard
Shelby Brown should know where her church was. As she hurried down the
street, all aglow once more, she felt girlishly happy. It came upon her
quite suddenly that she had rarely been happy like this before. Her life
at home, at school, with Miss Patty, had brought her quiet content; the
hours with her lover which were slowly receding from her thoughts had
stirred her passion; but save with a little boy like Tom she had never
played as she had played this morning. In the South there was rest and
passion, the warm breath of the refulgent summer; but in the North,
there was cold, tingling air, and jolly times. It was a place in which
to work hard; but also a place to play in, to go coasting, to run,
perhaps to dance.

She looked so young and sweet when she entered her church that the woman
at the end of the seat into which she was ushered smiled at her; an
unholy liberty in New York.

"All ye snow and hail, praise ye the Lord, praise Him and glorify Him
forever!"

She found it in her prayerbook, and all through the service, through the
Te Deum and prayer and litany, she was entering into the treasures of
the snow.

That night the thermometer rose twenty degrees and the next morning
there was only a dirty gray slush upon the street.

CHAPTER XVIII

New York had been preparing for Christmas. From all over the world
beautiful things had poured in at her docks and stations to be
distributed among her stores and shops. From the great steamers that
came daily to her ports, from the trains that snorted up to her depots,
were unloaded cases filled with garments of every texture and color;
rich silks; fanciful ribbons, undergarments far too lovely to be hid