What Patsy might have answered is not recorded, for they both happened to look up for the first time in a long space and saw that the sky above their heads had grown a dull, leaden color. They were no longer sitting in the midst of sunlight; the lady's-slippers had lost their golden radiance; the brook sounded plaintive and melancholy, and from the woods fringing the open came the call of the bob-white. "He's singin' for rain. Won't hurt a mite if we make toward some shelter." The tinker pulled Patsy to her feet and gathered up the basket and left-overs. "Hurry," said Patsy, with a strange, little, twisted smile on her lips. "Of course I was knowing, like all faery tales, it had to have an ending; but I want to remember it, just as we found it first--sprinkled with sunshine and not turning dull and gray like this." She started plunging through the woods, and the tinker was obliged to turn her about and set her going right, with the final instruction to follow her nose and he would catch up with her before she had caught up with it. She had reached the road, however, and thunder was grumbling uncomfortably near when the tinker joined her. "It's goin' to be a soaker," he announced, cheerfully. "Then we'd better tramp fast as we can and ask the first person we pass, are we on the right road to Arden." They tramped, but they passed no one. The road was surprisingly barren of shelters, and, strangely enough, of the two houses they saw one was temporarily deserted and the other unoccupied. The wind came with the breaking of the storm--that cold, piercing wind that often comes in June as a reminder that winter has not passed by so very long before. It whipped the rain across their faces and cut down their headway until it seemed to Patsy as if they barely crawled. They came to a tumble-down barn, but she was too cold and wet to stop where there was no fire. "Any place that's warm," she shouted across to the tinker; and he shouted back, as they rounded the bend of the road. "See, there it is at last!" The sight of a house ahead, whose active chimney gave good evidence of a fire within, spurred Patsy's lagging steps. But in response to their knocking, the door was opened just wide enough to frame the narrow face of a timid-eyed, nervous woman who bade them be gone even before they had gathered breath enough to ask for shelter. "Faith, 'tis a reminder that we are no longer living three hundred years ago," Patsy murmured between tightening lips. "How long in, do ye think, the fashion has been--to shut doors on poor wanderers?" At the next house, a half-mile beyond, they fared no better. The woman's voice was curter, and the uninviting muzzle of a bull-terrier was thrust out between the door and the woman's skirts. As they turned away Patsy's teeth were chattering; the chill and wet had crept into her bones and blood, turning her lips blue and her cheeks ashen; even the cutting wind failed to color them.