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tunneled his way into the back door.
    “How can people come for the weekend even to ski?” she demanded.
    He grinned. “They’ll come because the roads ’ull be open. Folks here know that snow is their bread and butter.”
    Reassured, she waited for the weekend. Then he would come. Jared Barnow—she spoke his name to herself and was shocked. How could she think of him after what had happened with Edwin? She searched her heart, her mind, to discover memories, not so much of guilt as of distaste. There were none. Could it be possible that she sought further completion of some sort? Of what sort? And what had Edwin to do with Jared? And why ask questions, especially when she wished no answers? Let life lead her where it would! She felt herself floating, passive, waiting for whom, for what, she did not know, she would not ask.
    …“I don’t see you here in this house, you know,” Jared said.
    He had come on Friday night, exactly as though she expected him, which she did and did not, hoping that he would come and again that he would not.
    “You’ll have to be careful for the first year or so,” Amelia had said—Amelia, her old childhood friend, whose house was in Philadelphia next door to her own childhood home and who was still there, unmarried and living alone in a houseful of inherited servants. It was less than a week after Arnold died, and she had not been able even to speak his name aloud, but Amelia was without tact and said whatever she liked and at all times. They were in the upstairs sitting room, where she and Amelia had cut out paper dolls, had accumulated records, had designed frocks, had met for a last moment before her wedding and now were meeting after Arnold’s death.
    “What do you mean, Amelia?” she had asked. Amelia had shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not speaking from experience, of course, but I’ve heard Mamma say that after Papa died—I was only three—she was so lonely that she was tempted to marry any man that asked her. After she got over that year she knew she didn’t want to marry at all.”
    “I shan’t want to marry again, either,” she had murmured. Much as she relied on Amelia for diversion, she had never been able to confide everything to her, especially as Amelia, being rather plain and certainly too blunt, had never been in love, so far as she knew. The crudity of Amelia’s remarks had stayed in her memory, however, and she recalled them now as she replied to Jared.
    “How do you see me?” she asked.
    “In a great beautiful house somewhere,” he replied promptly, as though he had thought about it. “I see you with servants to wait on you. I hate you to be here alone. I don’t want you to cook my breakfast. I make my own bed for I can’t bear to think of your doing it. Only when you’re at the piano there, or sitting on that high hearth in the firelight, do I feel I’m realty seeing you.”
    She was moved by his earnestness. “Thank you,” she said. “And you don’t know how you help me. I’ve known I must go back to the big house but I haven’t had the courage. I came away after my husband’s death, and I’ve lingered on, dreading to go back alone—”
    He interrupted her. “I’ll be with you. What I mean is—I’ll come to see you immediately and stay over a weekend, at least, now and then, if you’ll let me.”
    “Of course,” she said. “I’m very touched, and you mustn’t for any reason, think it necessary. I shall be quite all right once I’m there—in a day or two. I have friends next door. My husband and I grew up in that neighborhood. In fact, it was a question whether we’d live in his family home or mine. But my house was empty—my father died soon after my marriage and my mother died earlier. I was an only child and so everything was left to me, and I’m really fond of the house.”
    She spoke breathlessly, trying to explain all at once and not knowing quite what it was she wanted to explain. He listened raptly until she broke