ten
days Blix would be gone. Letters had been received from Aunt Kihm, and
also an exquisite black leather traveling-case, a present to her niece,
full of cut-glass bottles, ebony-backed brushes, and shell combs. Blix
was to leave on the second day of January. In the meanwhile she had
been reading far into her first-year text-books, underscoring and
annotating, studying for hours upon such subjects as she did not
understand, so that she might get hold of her work the readier when it
came to class-room routine and lectures. Hers was a temperament
admirably suited to the study she had chosen--self-reliant, cool, and
robust.

But it was not easy for her to go. Never before had Blix been away
from her home; never for longer than a week had she been separated from
her father, nor from Howard and Snooky. That huge city upon the
Atlantic seaboard, with its vast, fierce life, where beat the heart of
the nation, and where beyond Aunt Kihm she knew no friend, filled Blix
with a vague sense of terror and of oppression. She was going out into
a new life, a life of work and of study, a harsher life than she had
yet known. Her father, her friends, her home--all these were to be
left behind. It was not surprising that Blix should be daunted at the
prospect of so great a change in her life, now so close at hand. But
if the tears did start at times, no one ever saw them fall, and with a
courage that was all her own Blix watched the last days of the year
trooping past and the approach of the New Year that was to begin the
new life.

But Condy was thoroughly unhappy. Those wonderful three months were at
an end. Blix was going. In less than a week now she would be gone.
He would see the last of her. Then what? He pictured himself--when he
had said good-by to her and the train had lessened to a smoky blur in
the distance--facing about, facing the life that must then begin for
him, returning to the city alone, picking up the routine again. There
would be nothing to look forward to then; he would not see Blix in the
afternoon; would not sit with her in the evening in the little
dining-room of the flat overlooking the city and the bay; would not
wake in the morning with the consciousness that before the sun would
set he would see her again, be with her, and hear the sound of her
voice. The months that were to follow would be one long ache, one
long, harsh, colorless grind without her. How was he to get through
that first e