In a week she was ready and eager to go but the day of farewell found her clinging to Hannah in a panic.

When at last the old Craig carriage creaked slowly away down the lane with Hannah and Hetty waving from the farm-porch, the spirit of adventure flickered forlornly out and left her sobbing.

“Good-bye, Hannah dear!” she called, her eyes wet and wistful.  “Good-bye, Hetty!  And—­and don’t forget to write me all the news!  And don’t let Toby catch the birds!”

Hughie, blinking and upset, stared straight ahead at Nellie’s ears.

Kenny sobered.  How great his trust!  Hannah, waving her apron back there and wiping her eyes, trusted him.  And so did Hughie and Joan and even perhaps old Adam Craig; and Mr. Abbott whose gentle grilling he had endured with merely surface patience.

“Don’t cry, Joan, please!” he begged, understanding how dear familiar things are apt to loom in the pain of separation.  And then with her hand to his lips, he pledged himself to make her happiness the religion of his love.  It was a pledge he was destined to keep inviolate.

Ordinarily to Kenny, impatient in intervals of discomfort and delay, the trip with its rural junctions and branch roads would have been interminable torture.  But to-day, with Joan’s eyes, wide, dark, intent, he chose to marvel with her.

They lunched at noon between trains in a little country inn.  At seven, having come after much fragmentary travel into a comforting world of express trains and Pullmans, they dined in the train itself.  Joan watched the flying landscape, dotted with snow and vanishing lights, smiled with the shining wonder of it all in her eyes, and could not eat.  Kenny tried scolding and found her sorry, but she could not eat.

By eleven, when the train thundered into the terminal at Thirty-third Street, New York was wrapped in a scudding whirl of white dotted dizzily with lights.  Already to Kenny, buoyant, excited and inclined to stride around in purposeless circles, the lonely farm was very far away.  He was back again in his own world with the roar of the city in his ears—­and Joan beside him.  Ah! there he knew was the reason for his gladness.  Joan was beside him.

The taxi he commandeered threaded its way south through a maze of lights, hurrying crowds and noisy, weaving traffic to a tenement in Greenwich Village.  Joan, searching for the unknown sparkle of that Bohemian world she had been unable to envisage, stared at the unromantic basement doors ahead and clung to Kenny’s hand.

“It’s quite all right, mavourneen,” he assured her mischievously.  “Bohemia and poverty rub shoulders down here.  It’s picturesque.  And my club is only five blocks east.  Beyond this door there’s a mysterious magic tunnel that runs straight through the house to Somebody’s back-yard.  And in the back-yard is a castle and in the castle studios and skylights, electricity and steam heat and wide, old-fashioned fireplaces.  Once it was a tenement—­just like this with fifty dirty people in it—­but Ann with her magic wand has changed it all.”