At the Hampton station she took the trolley, alighting at the Common, following the narrow path made by pedestrians in the heavy snow to Fillmore Street.  She climbed the dark stairs, opened the dining-room door, and paused on the threshold.  Hannah and Edward sat there under the lamp, Hannah scanning through her spectacles the pages of a Sunday newspaper.  On perceiving Janet she dropped it hastily in her lap.

“Well, I was concerned about you, in all this storm!” she exclaimed.  “Thank goodness you’re home, anyway.  You haven’t seen Lise, have you?”

“Lise?” Janet repeated.  “Hasn’t she been home?”

“Your father and I have been alone all day long.  Not that it is so uncommon for Lise to be gone.  I wish it wasn’t!  But you!  When you didn’t come home for supper I was considerably worried.”

Janet sat down between her mother and father and began to draw off her gloves.

“I’m going to marry Mr. Ditmar,” she announced.

For a few moments the silence was broken only by the ticking of the old-fashioned clock.

“Mr. Ditmar!” said Hannah, at length.  “You’re going to marry Mr. Ditmar!”

Edward was still inarticulate.  His face twitched, his eyes watered as he stared at her.

“Not right away,” said Janet.

“Well, I must say you take it rather cool,” declared Hannah, almost resentfully.  “You come in and tell us you’re going to marry Mr. Ditmar just like you were talking about the weather.”

Hannah’s eyes filled with tears.  There had been indeed an unconscious lack of consideration in Janet’s abrupt announcement, which had fallen like a spark on the dry tinder of Hannah’s hope.  The result was a suffocating flame.  Janet, whom love had quickened, had a swift perception of this.  She rose quickly and took Hannah in her arms and kissed her.  It was as though the relation between them were reversed, and the daughter had now become the mother and the comforter.

“I always knew something like this would happen!” said Edward.  His words incited Hannah to protest.

“You didn’t anything of the kind, Edward Bumpus,” she exclaimed.

“Just to think of Janet livin’ in that big house up in Warren Street!” he went on, unheeding, jubilant.  “You’ll drop in and see the old people once in a while, Janet, you won’t forget us?”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, father,” said Janet.

“Well, he’s a fine man, Claude Ditmar, I always said that.  The way he stops and talks to me when he passes the gate—­”

“That doesn’t make him a good man,” Hannah declared, and added:  “If he wasn’t a good man, Janet wouldn’t be marrying him.”

“I don’t know whether he’s good or not,” said Janet.

“That’s so, too,” observed Hannah, approvingly.  “We can’t any of us tell till we’ve tried ’em, and then it’s too late to change.  I’d like to see him, but I guess he wouldn’t care to come down here to Fillmore Street.”  The difference between Ditmar’s social and economic standing and their own suggested appalling complications to her mind.  “I suppose I won’t get a sight of him till after you’re married, and not much then.”