t a sense of the significance of the whole thing--the eleven years
away, and the three years preceding those years; a sense too of the
meaning of those days just past, those recent days at home when there
were times of being blinded by the newly seen significance of those
years of living. They had been hard days because things had been crowded
so close; it had come too fast; currents had met too violently and the
long way between cause and effect had been lighted by flashes too
blinding. It had been like a great storm in which elements rush
together. It had almost swept her down, but she had come through it and
this was what she had brought out of it: a sense of life as precious, as
worth anything one might have to pay for it, a stirring new sense of the
future as adventure. She had been thinking of her life as defined, and
now it seemed that the future was there, a beautiful untouched thing, a
thing that was left, hers to do what she could with. Somehow she had
broken through, broken through the things that had closed in around her.
A great new thing had happened to her: she was no longer afraid to face
things! In those last few days she had been tossed, now this way, now
that; it seemed she had rather been made a fool of, but things had got
through to her--she was awake, alive, unafraid. Something had been
liberated in her. She turned to Deane, who was looking with a somber
steadiness ahead at the town. She touched his arm and he looked at her,
amazed at her shining eyes, shining just as they used to when as a girl
she was setting out for a good time, for some mischief, excitement.

"Well, anyway, Deane," she said in a voice that seemed to brush
everything else aside, "we're alive!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The summer had gone by and Ted Holland, who had gone West with Ruth in
May, was back in Freeport "breaking up the house." The place was offered
for sale; things had to be cleared out in one way or another. What none
of the children wanted was being sold to anybody who did happen to want
it; what nobody wanted was to be given away to such people as had to
take what they could get. And there was a great deal of it not even in
the class for giving away; "just truck" Ted kept callously calling it to
Harriett and their Cousin Flora. He whistled vigorously over some of the
"truck,"--a worn dog's collar, an old pair of the queer kind of house
shoes his mother wore, a spectacle case he had used to love to hear his