into tales about the forest, while the
tinker called the thickets about them full of birds, and whistled
their songs antiphonally with them.

"Do ye know," said Patsy, with a deep sigh, "I'm happier than ye can
tell me, and twice as happy as I can tell ye."

"An' this, hereabouts, wouldn't make a bad castle," suggested the
tinker, irrelevantly.

What Patsy might have answered is not recorded, for they both
happened to look up for the first time in a long space and saw that
the sky above their heads had grown a dull, leaden color. They were
no longer sitting in the midst of sunlight; the lady's-slippers had
lost their golden radiance; the brook sounded plaintive and
melancholy, and from the woods fringing the open came the call of the
bob-white.

"He's singin' for rain. Won't hurt a mite if we make toward some
shelter." The tinker pulled Patsy to her feet and gathered up the
basket and left-overs.

"Hurry," said Patsy, with a strange, little, twisted smile on her
lips. "Of course I was knowing, like all faery tales, it had to have
an ending; but I want to remember it, just as we found it
first--sprinkled with sunshine and not turning dull and gray like
this."

She started plunging through the woods, and the tinker was obliged to
turn her about and set her going right, with the final instruction
to follow her nose and he would catch up with her before she had
caught up with it. She had reached the road, however, and thunder was
grumbling uncomfortably near when the tinker joined her.

"It's goin' to be a soaker," he announced, cheerfully.

"Then we'd better tramp fast as we can and ask the first person we
pass, are we on the right road to Arden."

They tramped, but they passed no one. The road was surprisingly
barren of shelters, and, strangely enough, of the two houses they saw
one was temporarily deserted and the other unoccupied. The wind came
with the breaking of the storm--that cold, piercing wind that often
comes in June as a reminder that winter has not passed by so very
long before. It whipped the rain across their faces and cut down
their headway until it seemed to Patsy as if they barely crawled.
They came to a tumble-down barn, but she was too cold and wet to stop
where there was no fire.

"Any place that's warm," she shouted across to the tinker; and he
shouted back, as they rounded the bend of the road.

"See, there it is at last!"

The sight of a house ahead, whose active chimney gave good