are you going?" he said, suddenly.

"To-morrow."

"I am not to know where?"

"Why should you?" and then, a little quickly: "No, no. It is a
pilgrimage."

"When you return--" he began, but she shook her head.

"No, ... no. I do not know where I may be."

In the April twilight the electric lamps along the avenue snapped
alight. The air rang with the metallic chatter of sparrows.

They mounted the steps of her house; she turned and swept the dim avenue
with a casual glance.

"So you, too, are going north?" she asked, pleasantly.

"Yes--to-night."

She gave him her hand. She felt the pressure of his hand on her gloved
fingers after he had gone, although their hands had scarcely touched at
all.

And so she went into the dimly lighted house, through the drawing-room,
which was quite dark, into the music-room beyond; and there she sat down
upon a chair by the piano--a little gilded chair that revolved as she
pushed herself idly, now to the right, now to the left.

Yes, ... after all, she would go; ... she would make that pilgrimage to
the spot on earth her husband loved best of all--the sweet waters of the
Sagamore, where his beloved club lodge stood, and whither, for a month
every year, he had repaired with some old friends to renew a bachelor's
love for angling.

She had never accompanied him on these trips; she instinctively divined
a man's desire for a ramble among old haunts with old friends, freed for
a brief space from the happy burdens of domesticity.

The lodge on the Sagamore was now her shrine; there she would rest and
think of him, follow his footsteps to his best-loved haunts, wander
along the rivers where he had wandered, dream by the streams where he
had dreamed.

She had married her husband out of awe, sheer awe for his wonderful
personality. And he was wonderful; faultless in everything--though not
so faultless as to be in bad taste, she often told herself. His
_entourage_ also was faultless; and the general faultlessness of
everything had made her married life very perfect.

As she sat thinking in the darkened music-room, something stirred in the
hallway outside. She raised her eyes; the white bull-terrier stood in
the lighted doorway, looking in at her.

A perfectly incomprehensible and resistless rush of loneliness swept her
to her feet; in a moment she was down on the floor again, on her silken
knees, her arms around the dog, her head pressed tightly to his head.

"Oh," she said, c