Silliston--a very different Silliston from that she had
visited on the fragrant day in springtime, when the green on the common
had been embroidered with dandelions, and the great elms whose bare
branches were now fantastically traced against the flowing veil of white
--heavy with leaf. Vignettes emerged--only to fade!--of the old-world
houses whose quaint beauty had fascinated and moved her. And she found
herself wondering what had become of the strange man she had mistaken for
a carpenter. All that seemed to have taken place in a past life. She
asked Ditmar where he was going.

"Boston," he told her. "There's no other place to go."

"But you'll never get back if it goes on snowing like this."

"Well, the trains are still running," he assured her, with a quizzical
smile. "How about it, little girl?" It was a term of endearment derived,
undoubtedly, from a theatrical source, in which he sometimes indulged.

She did not answer. Surprisingly, to-day, she did not care. All she could
think of, all she wanted was to go on and on beside him with the world
shut out--on and on forever. She was his--what did it matter? They were
on their way to Boston! She began, dreamily, to think about Boston, to
try to restore it in her imagination to the exalted place it had held
before she met Ditmar; to reconstruct it from vague memories of childhood
when, in two of the family peregrinations, she had crossed it. Traces
remained of emotionally-toned impressions acquired when she had walked
about the city holding Edward's hand--of a long row of stately houses
with forbidding fronts, set on a hillside, of a wide, tree-covered space
where children were playing. And her childish verdict, persisting to-day,
was one of inaccessibility, impenetrability, of jealously guarded wealth
and beauty. Those houses, and the treasures she was convinced they must
contain, were not for her! Some of the panes of glass in their windows
were purple--she remembered a little thing like that, and asking her
father the reason! He hadn't known. This purple quality had somehow
steeped itself into her memory of Boston, and even now the colour stood
for the word, impenetrable. That was extraordinary. Even now! Well, they
were going to Boston; if Ditmar had said they were going to Bagdad it
would have been quite as credible--and incredible. Wherever they were
going, it was into the larger, larger life, and walls were to crumble
before them, walls through which they woul