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 would pass, even as they rent the white veil of the storm, into regions of beauty....

And now the world seemed abandoned to them alone, so empty, so still were the white villages flitting by; so empty, so still the great parkway of the Fells stretching away and away like an enchanted forest under the snow, like the domain of some sleeping king.  And the flakes melted silently into the black waters.  And the wide avenue to which they came led to a sleeping palace!  No, it was a city, Somerville, Ditmar told her, as they twisted in and out of streets, past stores, churches and fire-engine houses, breasted the heights, descended steeply on the far side into Cambridge, and crossed the long bridge over the Charles.  And here at last was Boston—­Beacon Street, the heart or funnel of it, as one chose.  Ditmar, removing one of the side curtains that she might see, with just a hint in his voice of a reverence she was too excited to notice, pointed out the stern and respectable facades of the twin Chippering mansions standing side by side.  Save for these shrines—­for such in some sort they were to him—­the Back Bay in his eyes was nothing more than a collection of houses inhabited by people whom money and social position made unassailable.  But to-day he, too, was excited.  Never had he been more keenly aware of her sensitiveness to experience; and he to whom it had not occurred to wonder at Boston wondered at her, who seemed able to summon forth a presiding,