e
through the blizzard. He had often, very often, stood in this same
place at night, and there was one window (Mrs. Pike's) which he had
guessed to be Mamie's.

The storm was so thick that he could not see this window now, but he
looked a long time through the thickness at that part of the gray plane
where he knew it was. Then his lips parted.

"Good-bye, Mamie," he said, softly. "Goodbye, Mamie."

He bent his body against the wind and went on, still keeping to the
back ways, until he came to the alley which passed behind his own home,
where, however, he paused only for a moment to make a quick survey of
the premises. A glance satisfied him; he ran to the next fence,
hoisted himself wearily over it, and dropped into Roger Tabor's back
yard.

He took shelter from the wind for a moment or two, leaning against the
fence, breathing heavily; then he stumbled on across the obliterated
paths of a vegetable-garden until he reached the house, and beginning
with the kitchen, began to make the circuit of the windows, peering
cautiously into each as he went, ready to tap on the pane should he
catch a glimpse of Ariel, and prepared to run if he stumbled upon her
grandfather. But the place seemed empty: he had made his reconnaisance
apparently in vain, and was on the point of going away, when he heard
the click of the front gate and saw Ariel coming towards him, her old
water-proof cloak about her head and shoulders, the patched, scant,
faded skirt, which he knew so well, blowing about her tumultuously. At
the sound of the gate he had crouched close against the side of the
house, but she saw him at once.

She stopped abruptly, and throwing the water-proof back from her head,
looked at him through the driven fog of snow. One of her hands was
stretched towards him involuntarily, and it was in that attitude that
he long remembered her: standing in the drift which had piled up
against the gate almost knee-deep, the shabby skirt and the black
water-proof flapping like torn sails, one hand out-stretched like that
of a figure in a tableau, her brown face with its thin features mottled
with cold and unlovely, her startled eyes fixed on him with a strange,
wild tenderness that held something of the laughter of whole
companionship in it mingling with a loyalty and championship that was
almost ferocious--she looked an Undine of the snow.

Suddenly she ran to him, still keeping her hand out-stretched until it
touched his own.

"H