y rolling keel under
her feet. She held up her head bravely against the first onslaught of
the storm. She set her hand to the rudder!

Perceiving that her mother had passed on ahead of her she sprang
forward in a run. She ran like a schoolboy, like a deer, like a man
from whose limbs heavy shackles have been struck off. She felt so
suddenly lightened of a great heaviness that she could have clapped
her hands over her head and bounded into the air. She was, after all,
but eighteen years old, and three years before had been a child.

She came up to her mother with a rush, radiating life. Mrs. Marshall
looked at the glowing face and her own eyes, dry till then, filled
with the tears so rare in her self-controlled life. She put out her
hand, took Sylvia's, and they sped along through the quick-gathering
dusk, hand-in-hand like sisters.

Judith and Lawrence had reached home before them, and the low brown
house gleamed a cheerful welcome to them from shining windows. For the
first time in her life, Sylvia did not take for granted her home, with
all that it meant. For an instant it looked strangely sweet to her.
She had a passing glimpse, soon afterwards lost in other impressions,
of how in after years she would look back on the roof which had
sheltered and guarded her youth.

She lay awake that night a long time, staring up into the cold
blackness, her mind very active and restless in the intense stillness
about her. She thought confusedly but intensely of many things--the
months behind her, of Jerry, of Mrs. Draper, of her yellow dress,
of her mother--of herself. In the lucidity of those silent hours of
wakefulness she experienced for a time the piercing, regenerating
thrust of self-knowledge. For a moment the full-beating pulses of her
youth slackened, and between their throbs there penetrated to her
perplexed young heart the rarest of human emotions, a sincere
humility. If she had not burned the yellow dress at Mercerton, she
would have arisen and burned it that night....

During the rest of the Christmas vacation she avoided being alone. She
and Judith and Lawrence skated a great deal, and Sylvia learned at
last to cut the grapevine pattern on the ice. She also mastered the
first movement of the Sonata Pathetique, so that old Reinhardt was
almost satisfied.

The day after the University opened for the winter term the Huberts
announced the engagement of their daughter Eleanor to Jermain Fiske,
Jr., the brilliant so