ey came to a little gate which swung upon a decrepit
hinge. It made in upon a strip of narrow brick walk, swept scrupulously
clean, lined with well-kept tulips; a walk which in turn arrived at the
foot of a short and narrow stair leading up to the porch of the
green-shuttered house itself.

It was a small place of some half-dozen rooms, and it served now, as it
had for these twenty years, as home and workshop alike for its tenant.
Aurora Lane had lived here so long that most folk thought she owned the
place. As a matter of fact, she owned only a vast sheaf of receipted
bills for rent paid to Nels Jorgens, the wagon-maker across the street.
In all these twenty years her rent had been paid promptly, as were all
her other bills.

Aurora Lane was a milliner, who sometimes did dress-making as well--the
only milliner in Spring Valley--and had held that honor for many years.
A tiny sign above the door announced her calling. A certain hat, red of
brim and pronounced of plume, which for unknown years had reposed in the
front window of the place--the sort of hat which proved bread-winning
among farmers' wives and in the families of villagers of moderate
income--likewise announced that here one might find millinery.

When she first had moved into these quarters so many years ago, scarce
more than a young girl, endeavoring to make a living in the world, the
maples had not been quite so wide, the grass along the sidewalk not
quite so dusty.

It was here that for twenty years Aurora Lane had made her fight
against the world. It had been the dream, the fierce, flaming ambition
of all her life, that her son, her son beloved, her son born out of holy
wedlock, might after all have some chance in life.

It was for this that she aided in his disappearance in his infancy,
studiously giving out to all--without doubt even to the unknown father
of the boy--the word that the child had died, still in its infancy, in a
distant state, among relatives of her own. She herself, caught in the
shallows of poverty and unable to travel, had not seen him in all these
years--had not dared to see him--had in all the dulled but not dead
agony of a mother's yearning postponed her sweet dream of a mother's
love, and with unmeasurable bravery held her secret all these awful
years. Schooling here and there, at length the long term in college, had
kept the boy altogether a stranger to his native town, a stranger even
to his own mother. He did not know his ow