away. Her fox terrier, whom the family, for obscure
reasons, called the Pig, arrived in the middle of the afternoon in a
crate, and shivering with the chill of the house, was tied up behind
the kitchen range, where, for all the heat, he still trembled and
shuddered at long intervals, his head down, his eyes rolled up,
bewildered and discountenanced by so much confusion and so many new
faces.

Outside the weather continued lamentable. The rain beat down steadily
upon the heaps of snow on the grass-plats by the curbstones, melting
it, dirtying it, and reducing it to viscid slush. The sky was lead
grey; the trees, bare and black as though built of iron and wire,
dripped incessantly. The sparrows, huddling under the house-eaves or in
interstices of the mouldings, chirped feebly from time to time, sitting
disconsolate, their feathers puffed out till their bodies assumed
globular shapes. Delivery wagons trundled up and down the street at
intervals, the horses and drivers housed in oil-skins.

The neighborhood was quiet. There was no sound of voices in the
streets. But occasionally, from far away in the direction of the river
or the Lake Front, came the faint sounds of steamer and tug whistles.
The sidewalks in either direction were deserted. Only a solitary
policeman, his star pinned to the outside of his dripping rubber coat,
his helmet shedding rivulets, stood on the corner absorbed in the
contemplation of the brown torrent of the gutter plunging into a sewer
vent.

Landry and Laura were in the library at the rear of the house, a small
room, two sides of which were occupied with book-cases. They were busy
putting the books in place. Laura stood half-way up the step-ladder
taking volume after volume from Landry as he passed them to her.

"Do you wipe them carefully, Landry?" she asked.

He held a strip of cloth torn from an old sheet in his hand, and rubbed
the dust from each book before he handed it to her.

"Yes, yes; very carefully," he assured her. "Say," he added, "where are
all your modern novels? You've got Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, of
course, and Eliot--yes, and here's Hawthorne and Poe. But I haven't
struck anything later than Oliver Wendell Holmes."

Laura put up her chin. "Modern novels--no indeed. When I've yet to read
'Jane Eyre,' and have only read 'Ivanhoe' and 'The Newcomes' once."

She made a point of the fact that her taste was the extreme of
conservatism, refusing to acknowledge hardly any