ith his handkerchief he could scarcely
believe his senses that this was the woman whose resistance had demanded
all his force to overcome. Indeed, although he recognized the symptoms
she betrayed as feminine, as having been registered--though feebly
compared to this! by incidents in his past, precisely his difficulty
seemed to be in identifying this complex and galvanic being as a woman,
not as something almost fearful in her significance, outside the bounds
of experience....

Presently she ceased to tremble, and he drew her to the window. The day
was as mild as autumn, the winter sun like honey in its mellowness; a
soft haze blurred the outline of the upper bridge.

"Only two more days until Sunday," he whispered, caressingly,
exultantly....

CHAPTER XII

It had been a strange year in Hampton, unfortunate for coal merchants,
welcome to the poor. But Sunday lacked the transforming touch of
sunshine. The weather was damp and cold as Janet set out from Fillmore
Street. Ditmar, she knew, would be waiting for her, he counted on her,
and she could not bear to disappoint him, to disappoint herself. And
all the doubts and fears that from time to time had assailed her were
banished by this impulse to go to him, to be with him. He loved her! The
words, as she sat in the trolley car, ran in her head like the lilt of a
song. What did the weather matter?

When she alighted at the lonely cross-roads snow had already begun to
fall. But she spied the automobile, with its top raised, some distance
down the lane, and in a moment she was in it, beside him, wrapped in
the coat she had now come to regard as her own. He buttoned down the
curtains and took her in his arms.

"What shall we do to-day," she asked, "if it snows?"

"Don't let that worry you, sweetheart," he said. "I have the chains on,
I can get through anything in this car."

He was in high, almost turbulent spirits as he turned the car and drove
it out of the rutty lane into the state road. The snow grew thicker and
thicker still, the world was blotted out by swiftly whirling, feathery
flakes that melted on the windshield, and through the wet glass Janet
caught distorted glimpses of black pines and cedars beside the highway.

The ground was spread with fleece. Occasionally, and with startling
suddenness, other automobiles shot like dark phantoms out of the
whiteness, and like phantoms disappeared. Presently, through the veil,
she recognized Silliston--a very di