“I’m through with him,” Lise declared briefly, tugging at her hair.

“Through with him?” Janet repeated.

Lise paused in her labours and looked at her sister steadily.  “I handed him the mit—­do you get me?”

“But why?”

“Why?  I was sick of him—­ain’t that enough?  And then he got mixed up with a Glendale trolley and smashed his radiator, and the Wizard people sacked him.  I always told him he was too fly.  It’s lucky for him I wasn’t in the car.”

“It’s lucky for you,” said Janet.  Presently she inquired curiously:  “Aren’t you sorry?”

“Nix.”  Lise shook her head, which was now bowed, her face hidden by hair.  “Didn’t I tell you I was sick of him?  But he sure was some spender,” she added, as though in justice bound to give him his due.

Janet was shocked by the ruthlessness of it, for Lise appeared relieved, almost gay.  She handed Janet a box containing five peppermint creams—­all that remained of Mr. Wiley’s last gift.

One morning in the late spring Janet crossed the Warren Street bridge, the upper of the two spider-like structures to be seen from her office window, spanning the river beside the great Hampton dam.  The day, dedicated to the memory of heroes fallen in the Civil War, the thirtieth of May, was a legal holiday.  Gradually Janet had acquired a dread of holidays as opportunities never realized, as intervals that should have been filled with unmitigated joys, and yet were invariably wasted, usually in walks with Eda Rawle.  To-day, feeling an irresistible longing for freedom, for beauty, for adventure, for quest and discovery of she knew not what, she avoided Eda, and after gazing awhile at the sunlight dancing in the white mist below the falls, she walked on, southward, until she had left behind her the last straggling houses of the city and found herself on a wide, tarvia road that led, ultimately, to Boston.  So read the sign.

Great maples, heavy with leaves, stood out against the soft blue of the sky, and the sunlight poured over everything, bathing the stone walls, the thatches of the farmhouses, extracting from the copses of stunted pine a pungent, reviving perfume.  Sometimes she stopped to rest on the pine needles, and walked on again, aimlessly, following the road because it was the easiest way.  There were spring flowers in the farmhouse yards, masses of lilacs whose purple she drank in eagerly; the air, which had just a tang of New England sharpness, was filled with tender sounds, the clucking of hens, snatches of the songs of birds, the rustling of maple leaves in the fitful breeze.  A chipmunk ran down an elm and stood staring at her with beady, inquisitive eyes, motionless save for his quivering tail, and she put forth her hand, shyly, beseechingly, as though he held the secret of life she craved.  But he darted away.