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 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.