and there were strawberries.

They were charmed with their housekeeping. "It would have been like
this," Derry said--all eyes for her loveliness, "if you had been the girl
in the Toy Shop and I had been the shabby boy--"

Jean pondered. "I wonder if a big house is ever really a home?"

"Not ours. Mother tried to make it--but it has always been a sort of
museum with Dad's collections."

"Do you think that some day we could have a little house?"

"We can have whatever you want." His smile warmed her.

"Wouldn't you want it, Derry?"

"If you were in it."

"Let's talk about it, and plan it, and put dream furniture in it, and
dream friends--"

"More Lovely Dreams?"

"Well, something like that--a House o' Dreams, Derry, without any gold
dragons or marble balls or queer porcelain things; just our own bits of
furniture and china, and a garden, and Muffin and Polly Ann--" Her eyes
were wistful.

"You shall have it now if you wish."

"Not until you can share it with me--"

And that was the beginning of their fantastic pilgrimage. In the time
that was left to them they were to find a house of dreams, and as Jean
said, expansively, "all the rest."

"We will start tonight," Derry declared. "There's such a moon."

It was the kind of moon that whitened the world; one swam in a sea of
light. Derry's runabout was a fairy car. Jean's hair was molten gold,
her lover's pale silver--as with bare heads, having passed the city
limits, they took the open road.

It was as warm as summer, and there were fragrances which seemed to wash
over them in waves as they passed old gardens and old orchards. There
was bridal-wreath billowing above stone fences, snow-balls, pale globes
among the green, beds of iris, purple-black beneath the moon.

They forded a stream--more silver, and a silver road after that.

"Where are we going?" Jean breathed.

"I know a house--"

It was a little house set on top of a hill, where indeed no little house
should be set, for little houses should nestle, protected by the slopes
back of them. But this little house was set up there for the view--the
Monument a spectral shaft, miles away, the Potomac broadening out beyond
it, the old trees of the Park sleeping between. This was what the little
house saw by night; it saw more than that by day.

It was not an empty house. One window was lighted, a square of gold in a
lower room.

They did not know who lived in the house. They did not car