don' know. I'd like to give the boys a better start than
I had, but I'm my own boss here and one of the leading men. That's
always something."

Peter went and looked out of the smudged windows while he considered
this. The long scrapes of the wind in the loose snow were like the
scratches of great claws. It was now about mail time and a few people
began to stir in the street; the clear light and the cold gave them a
poverty-bitten look.

"Does anybody ever get rich in Bloombury?"

"Not that I know of. There's Mr. Dassonville in Harmony--Dave
Dassonville, the richest man in these parts."

"I suppose he could tell me how to go about it?"

"I suppose he would if he knows. Mostly these things just happen."

Peter did not say anything more just then; he was watching a man and a
girl of about his own age who had come out of a frame house farther down
the street. The young man was walking so as to shield her from the wind,
her rosy cheek was at his shoulder, and she smiled up at him over her
muff, from dark, bright eyes.

"What's set you on to talk about riches? Thinking of doing something in
that line yourself?"

"Yes," said Peter, kicking at the baseboard with his toes. "I don't know
how it is to be done, but I've got to be rich. I've just simply got to."

II

It was along in the beginning of spring on a day full of wet cloud and
clearing wind, that Peter walked over to Harmony to inquire of Mr. David
Dassonville the way to grow rich. It was Sunday afternoon and the air
sweet with the sap adrip from the orchards lately pruned and the smell
of the country road dried to elasticity by the winds of March.

Between timidity and the conviction that a week day would have been
better suited to his business, he drew on to the place of his errand
very slowly, for he was sore with the raking of the dragon's claws, and
unrested. It had been a terrible scrape to get together the last
instalment of interest, and since Ellen had shattered it with the gossip
about Ada Brown's engagement, there had been no House with Shining Walls
for Peter to withdraw into out of the dragon's breath of poverty; above
all, no Princess.

He did not know where the House had come from any more than he knew now
where it had gone. It was a gift out of his childhood to his shy,
unfriended youth, but he understood that if ever its walls should waver
and rise again to enclose his dreams, there would be no Princess. Never
any more. Princesses w