Cynthia, it will be readily perceived, was growing up. No blossom-laden tree had flashed suddenly upon her inward vision,--Fate, perhaps, had been kinder to her sister,--but certain disturbing questions and indistinct, reluctant perceptions had gleamed for a moment across her ready imagination, and then had faded away before she could see them clearly. They were the growing pains of her mind, though she did not know that. One day she felt the weight of coming years; the next the ecstasy of their hidden secrets. Into her life, she would have said could she have found words to describe it, there had crept a kind of rhythm, now quick and joyous with melody, now slow and sad in its cadences. It was all quite unexplainable, and at times most bewildering. And when on Christmas eve at the concert in the church she discovered all at once that John, reciting a piece, in a velvet suit, skillfully fashioned from the discarded parlor lambrequin, was something to cry over instead of to smile at as the others were doing, as _she_ had always done before, she understood that the clear, orderly days of her little girlhood had gone away. Nor could she then know that they would return to her after many years, clear, orderly, luminous, their certain rhythms in harmonious accord. Thus it happened that on a clear February morning, while the others were coasting down the long hill, Cynthia played the part of the pilgrim. Clad in red hood and mittens and in her red coat with its long cape, which so effectually hid the necessary box with its supernatural powers, she hurried to the stable and through its big, yawning doors into the snow-covered fields which led almost directly to the woods and high pastures. The crust of the snow was hard enough to bear her weight, and she hurried on until she was beyond the reach of the eyes and ears of those in the immediate neighborhood. Once within the shadow of the trees, she stood beneath a great pine, almost shamefaced over her yielding to the desire to come on such an errand. But the stillness of the woods, broken only by the occasional cry of a bluejay or the swish of pine boughs in the wind, reassured her in her purpose, and she began the journey of the pilgrim with his silver box.