all very well to preach, but just
you tell me what you would have done in my place."

"I should have left those big rooms, filled with things to dust, and let
the dust lie on them--even such an awful thing as that!"

Lydia considered this with honest surprise. "Why, do you know, it never
occurred to me I could do that!"

Rankin nodded. "It's a common hallucination," he explained. "I've had
it. I have to struggle against it still."

"Hallucination?"

"The notion that you belong to the things that belong to you."

Lydia looked at him sidewise out of her clear dark eyes. She was
beginning to feel more at home in his odd repertory of ideas. "I
wonder," she mused, "if that's why I always feel so much freer and
happier in old clothes--that I don't forget that they're for me and I'm
not for them. But really, you know, dressmakers and mothers and folks
get you to thinking that you are for clothes--you're made to show them
off." Rankin vouchsafed no opinion as to this problem of young-ladyhood.
"Here's your sister's rain," he said instead, pointing across the
clearing, where against the dark tree-trunks fine, clear lines slanted
down to the dry grass. Lydia rose in some agitation. "Why, I didn't
really think it would rain! I thought it was just Marietta's--" She
glanced down in dismay at her thin low shoes and the amber-colored silk
of her ruffled skirt.

Rankin stood up eagerly. "Ah, I've a chance to do you a service. Just
step in, won't you, a moment and let me skirmish around and see what a
bachelor's establishment can offer to a beautiful young lady who mustn't
get wet."

Lydia moved into the wide, low room, saying deprecatingly, "It wouldn't
hurt _me_ to get wet, you know. But this dress just came from Paris, and
I haven't had a chance to show it to anybody yet."

Rankin laughed, hastening to draw up a chair before the hearth, where a
few embers still glowed, their presence explained by the autumnal chill
which now struck sharply across the room from the open door as the rain
began to patter on the roof. The girl looked about her in silence,
apparently with surprise.

"Well, how do you like it?" asked the master of the house, throwing some
dry twigs on the fire so that the flame, leaping up, lighted the
corners, already dusky with the approach of evening. "It's not very
tidy, is it?" He began rummaging in a recess in the wall, tumbling out
coats and shoes and hats in his haste. Finally, "There!" he cried in
tri