vy black shawl, throwing it over her and
clutching it closed at the throat.

"Where you goin', Hanna?"

"Walkin'," she said, slamming the door after her.

In Adalia, chiefly remarkable for the Indestructo Safe Works and a river
which annually overflows its banks, with casualties, the houses sit well
back from tree-bordered streets, most of them frame, shingle-roofed
veterans that have lived through the cycle-like years of the bearing, the
marrying, the burying of two, even three, generations of the same surname.

A three-year-old, fifteen-mile traction connects the court-house with the
Indestructo Safe Works. High Street, its entire length, is paved. During a
previous mayoralty the town offered to the Lida Tool Works a handsome bonus
to construct branch foundries along its river-banks, and, except for the
annual flood conditions, would have succeeded.

In spring Adalia is like a dear old lady's garden of marigold and
bleeding-heart. Flushes of sweetpeas ripple along its picket fences and
off toward the backyards are long grape-arbors, in autumn their great
fruit-clusters ripening to purple frost. Come winter there is almost an
instant shriveling to naked stalk, and the trellis-work behind vines comes
through. Even the houses seem immediately to darken of last spring's paint,
and, with windows closed, the shades are drawn. Oftener than not Adalia
spends its evening snugly behind these drawn shades in great scoured
kitchens or dining-rooms, the house-fronts dark.

When Mrs. Burkhardt stepped out into an evening left thus to its stilly
depth, shades drawn against it, a light dust of snow, just fallen, was
scurrying up-street before the wind, like something phantom with its skirts
blowing forward. Little drifts of it, dry as powder, had blown up against
the porch. She sidestepped them, hurrying down a wind-swept brick walk and
out a picket gate that did not swing entirely after. Behind her, the house
with its wimple of shingle roof and unlighted front windows seemed to
recede somewhere darkly. She stood an undecided moment, her face into the
wind. Half down the block an arc-light swayed and gave out a moving circle
of light. Finally she turned her back and went off down a side-street, past
a lighted corner grocer, crossed a street to avoid the black mouth of an
alley, then off at another right angle. The houses here were smaller,
shoulder to shoulder and directly on the sidewalk.

Before one of these, for no particula