her and twisted her arm, roughly--Janet could hear her cries through the
window-=when an elderly woman entered, seized him, struggling with him.
He put out his tongue at her, but presently released his sister, who
stood rubbing her arm, her lips moving in evident recrimination and
complaint. The faces of the two were plain now; the boy resembled Ditmar,
but the features of the girl, heavy and stamped with self-indulgence,
were evidently reminiscent of the woman who had been his wife. Then the
shade was pulled down, abruptly; and Janet, overcome by a sense of horror
at her position, took to flight....

When, after covering the space of a block she slowed down and tried to
imagine herself as established in that house, the stepmother of those
children, she found it impossible. Despite the fact that her attention
had been focussed so strongly on them, the fringe of her vision had
included their surroundings, the costly furniture, the piano against the
farther wall, the music rack. Evidently the girl was learning to play.
She felt a renewed, intenser bitterness against her own lot: she was
aware of something within her better and finer than the girl, than the
woman who had been her mother had possessed--that in her, Janet, had
lacked the advantages of development. Could it--could it ever be
developed now? Had this love which had come to her brought her any nearer
to the unknown realm of light she craved?...

CHAPTER XI

Though December had come, Sunday was like an April day before whose
sunlight the night-mists of scruples and morbid fears were scattered and
dispersed. And Janet, as she fared forth from the Fillmore Street flat,
felt resurging in her the divine recklessness that is the very sap of
life. The future, save of the immediate hours to come, lost its power
over her. The blue and white beauty of the sky proclaimed all things
possible for the strong; and the air was vibrant with the sweet music of
bells, calling her to happiness. She was going to meet happiness, to meet
love--to meet Ditmar! The trolley which she took in Faber Street, though
lagging in its mission, seemed an agent of that happiness as it left the
city behind it and wound along the heights beside the tarvia roadway
above the river, bright glimpses of which she caught through the openings
in the woods. And when she looked out of the window on her right she
beheld on a little forested rise a succession of tiny "camps" built by
residents of Hampt