is wisdom, even his fancies. Save
in her bitterness, on that first night, I had not heard her laugh; and
it was as if something were set free. I could not help looking at her,
but that did not matter, for she did not see me. She was listening to
Abel with an almost childish delight in her face; and in her eyes was
the look of one in a place before unvisited.

Some while after we had moved away from the table and sat together about
the cooking range, we heard the questioning horn of a motor. We knew
that it would belong to the Proudfits, since for us in Friendship there
exists no other motor, and moreover this one was standing at my gate.
Abel went out there and came back to tell us that the car had been in
town to fetch the Proudfits' lawyer, and that Madame Proudfit had kindly
sent it for Delia "and spoilt everything," he added frankly. As he said
that, Abel looked at her, and I saw that a dream may persist through
personality itself. As I have said, if a god were human, Abel would have
been like a god; and in nothing more so than in this understanding of
the immortalities.

Calliope stood up and caught, and held, my eyes in passing.

"Let's you and Abel and I take Delia home in the automobile," she said;
"there ain't anything so good for folks as fresh air."

I brought a warm wrap for Delia, a crimson cloak of mine which, so to
say, drew a line about her, defining her prettiness; and in the
starlight we set off along the snowless Plank Road, Delia and Abel and I
in the tonneau of the machine, and I silent. It had befallen strangely
that over this road Delia More and I should be faring in the Proudfits'
car, and beside her Abel Halsey as if, for such as he and she, a dream
may, just possibly, come back.

"See," she said to Abel, "the sky has gone back up again."

"Yes," Abel assented, "one of the things even the sky can't do is to
change the way things are."

"Oh, I know, I know ..." said Delia More.

"I want you to feel that," said Abel, gently. "Things are the way things
are, and no use trying to leave them out of it. Besides, you need them.
They're foundation. Then you build, and build better. That's all there
is to it, Delia."

She was silent, and Abel sat looking up at the stars.

"All there is to it except what I said about the other side of the sky,"
he said. "And then me. I'll help."

From my thought of these two I remember that I drifted on to some
consideration of myself, for their presence opene