“Very much?” he asked, looking down at her with such a queer expression.  And his voice, too, sounded queer.  He was trying to smile.

Suddenly Honora realized that he was suffering, and she felt the pangs of contrition.  She could not remember the time when she had been away from Peter, and it was natural that he should be stricken at the news.  Peter, who was the complement of all who loved and served her, of Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom and Catherine, and who somehow embodied them all.  Peter, the eternally dependable.

She found it natural that the light should be temporarily removed from his firmament while she should be at boarding-school, and yet in the tenderness of her heart she pitied him.  She put her hands impulsively upon his shoulders as he stood looking at her with that queer expression which he believed to be a smile.

“Peter, you dear old thing, indeed I shall miss you!  I don’t know what I shall do without you, and I’ll write to you every single week.”

Gently he disengaged her arms.  They were standing under that which, for courtesy’s sake, had always been called the chandelier.  It was in the centre of the parlour, and Uncle Tom always covered it with holly and mistletoe at Christmas.

“Why do you say I’ll never come back?” asked Honora.  “Of course I shall come back, and live here all the rest of my life.”

Peter shook his head slowly.  He had recovered something of his customary quizzical manner.

“The East is a strange country,” he said.  “The first thing we know you’ll be marrying one of those people we read about, with more millions than there are cars on the Olive Street line.”

Honora was a little indignant.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk so, Peter,” she said.  “In the first place, I shan’t see any but girls at Sutcliffe.  I could only see you for a few minutes once a week if you were there.  And in the second place, it isn’t exactly—­Well—­dignified to compare the East and the West the way you do, and speak about people who are very rich and live there as though they were different from the people we know here.  Comparisons, as Shakespeare said, are odorous.”

“Honora,” he declared, still shaking his head, “you’re a fraud, but I can’t help loving you.”

For a long time that night Honora lay in bed staring into the darkness, and trying to realize what had happened.  She heard the whistling and the puffing of the trains in the cinder-covered valley to the southward, but the quality of these sounds had changed.  They were music now.

CHAPTER VI

HONORA HAS A GLIMPSE OF THE WORLD