s."

"Don't you love him?"

"No, Marie-Louise. And we mustn't talk about it. Love is a sacred thing."

"I like to talk about it. In summer I talk to Pan. But he's out now in
the snow and his pipes are frozen."

The little drawing-room seemed to Anne anything but little until she
learned that there was a larger one across the hall. Austin and his wife
went up-stairs as soon as the coffee had been served, and Marie-Louise
led Anne through the shadowy vastness of the great drawing-room to a
window which overlooked the river. "You can't see the river, but the
light over the doorway shines on my old Pan's head. You can see him
grinning out of the snow."

The effect of that white head peering from the blackness was uncanny. The
shaft of light struck straight across the peaked chin and twisted mouth.
The snow had made him a cap which covered his horns and which gave him
the look of a rakish old tipster.

"Oh, Marie-Louise, do you talk to him of love?"

"Yes. Wait till you see him in the spring with the pink roses back of
him. He seems to get younger in the spring."

Anne, going to bed that night in a suite of rooms which might have
belonged to a princess, wondered if she should wake in the morning and
find herself dreaming. To have her own bath, a silk canopy over her head,
to know that breakfast would be served when she rang for it, and that her
mail and newspapers would be brought--these were unbelievable things. She
had a feeling that if she told Uncle Rod he would shake his head over it.
He had a theory that luxury tended to cramp the soul.

Yet her last thought was not of Uncle Rod but of Richard. She had come
intending to give him a sharp opinion of his neglect of Nancy. But he had
been so glad to see her, and had given her such a good time. Yet she had
spoken of Nancy's loneliness.

"I hated to leave her," she said, "but it seemed as if I had to come."

"Of course," he agreed, with his eyes on her glowing face, "and anyhow,
she has Sulie."

Marie-Louise, in the days that followed, found interest and occupation in
showing the Country Mouse the sights of the city.

"If you want to see such things," she said rather grandly, "I shall be
glad to go with you."

Anne insisted that they should not be driven in state and style. "People
make pilgrimages on foot," she told Marie-Louise gravely, but with a
twinkle in her eye. "I don't want to whirl up to Grant's tomb, or to the
door of Trinity. And I like the subwa