It was ten minutes later when Maud got up to go home and May was silent, absorbed in her own thoughts. The tale of the prince was forgotten and she thought only of the town, of what it had done to her, what it would do again when the chance offered. The two grocers were both, however, from another place and knew nothing of her. She thought of the long ride to the shore of Sandusky Bay. Maud had conveyed to her some notion of what the trip meant to her. May’s mind raced. “I could not be alone with a man. I wouldn’t dare,” she thought. Maud had said they would go in a surrey and there was something, that could be used now, in the story she had told about the prince. She could insist that, because of the prince, Maud was not to leave her alone with another man, with the strange grocer, not for a moment. May arose and stood irresolutely by the front door of the Edgley house and watched Maud go through the gate. How her shoulders drooped. “Oh, well, I’ll go. You fix it up. Don’t you tell anyone in the world, but I’ll go,” she said and then, before Maud Welliver could recover from her surprise, and from the glad thrill that ran through her body, May had opened the door and had disappeared into the Edgley house. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V THE Dewdrop, where the dance Maud and May were to attend was to be held was, in May Edgley’s day and no doubt is now, a dreary enough place. An east and west trunk line here came down almost to the water’s edge, touching and then swinging off inland again, and on a narrow strip of land between the tracks and the bay several huge ice houses had been built. To the west of the ice houses were four other buildings, buildings less huge but equally stark and unsightly. The shore of the bay, turned beyond the ice houses, leaving the four latter buildings standing at some distance from the railroad, and during ten months of the year they were uninhabited and stared with curtainless windows—that looked like great dead eyes—out over the water. The buildings had been erected by an ice company, with headquarters at Cleveland, for the housing of its workmen during the ice-cutting season, and the upper floors, reached by outside stairways, had rickety balconies running about the four sides. The balconies served as entry ways to small sleeping rooms each provided with a bunk built against the inner wall and filled with straw. Still further west was the village of Dewdrop itself, a place of some eight or ten small unpainted frame houses, inhabited by men who combined fishing with small farming, and on the shore before each house a small sailing craft was drawn, during the winter months, far up on the sand out of the reach of storms.