fferent Silliston from that she had
visited on the fragrant day in springtime, when the green on the common
had been embroidered with dandelions, and the great elms whose bare
branches were now fantastically traced against the flowing veil of
white--heavy with leaf. Vignettes emerged--only to fade!--of the
old-world houses whose quaint beauty had fascinated and moved her. And
she found herself wondering what had become of the strange man she had
mistaken for a carpenter. All that seemed to have taken place in a past
life. She asked Ditmar where he was going.

"Boston," he told her. "There's no other place to go."

"But you'll never get back if it goes on snowing like this."

"Well, the trains are still running," he assured her, with a quizzical
smile. "How about it, little girl?" It was a term of endearment derived,
undoubtedly, from a theatrical source, in which he sometimes indulged.

She did not answer. Surprisingly, to-day, she did not care. All she
could think of, all she wanted was to go on and on beside him with the
world shut out--on and on forever. She was his--what did it matter? They
were on their way to Boston! She began, dreamily, to think about Boston,
to try to restore it in her imagination to the exalted place it had
held before she met Ditmar; to reconstruct it from vague memories of
childhood when, in two of the family peregrinations, she had crossed it.
Traces remained of emotionally-toned impressions acquired when she had
walked about the city holding Edward's hand--of a long row of
stately houses with forbidding fronts, set on a hillside, of a wide,
tree-covered space where children were playing. And her childish
verdict, persisting to-day, was one of inaccessibility, impenetrability,
of jealously guarded wealth and beauty. Those houses, and the treasures
she was convinced they must contain, were not for her! Some of the panes
of glass in their windows were purple--she remembered a little thing
like that, and asking her father the reason! He hadn't known. This
purple quality had somehow steeped itself into her memory of Boston,
and even now the colour stood for the word, impenetrable. That was
extraordinary. Even now! Well, they were going to Boston; if Ditmar had
said they were going to Bagdad it would have been quite as credible--and
incredible. Wherever they were going, it was into the larger, larger
life, and walls were to crumble before them, walls through which they
would pass, even as they