There was, for the boy still staring at it through the dusk, something particularly personal in the picture, for ever since his father had died, three years ago, Peter had had a dragon of his own to fight. Its name was Mortgage. It had its lair in Lawyer Keplinger's office, from which it threatened twice yearly to come out and eat up his mother and Ellen and the little house and farm, and required to have its mouth stopped with great wads of interest which took all Peter's laborious days to scrape together. This year, however, he had hopes, if the garden turned out well, of lopping off a limb or a claw of the dragon by way of a payment on the principal, which somehow seemed to bring the Princess so much nearer, that as Peter lay quite comfortably staring up at the glimmer on the wall, the four gold lines of the frame began to stretch up and out and the dark block of the picture to recede until it became the great hall of a palace again, and there was the Princess coming toward him in a golden shimmer. There was just such another glow on the afternoon when Peter walked over to the berrying and came up with the apple-cheeked girl whose name was Ada, a good half mile from the others. As they climbed together over uneven ground she gave him her hand to hold, and there was very little to say and no need of saying it until they came to the hill overlooking the pasture, yellowing toward the end of summer, full of late bloom and misty colour passing insensibly into light. Threads of gossamer caught on the ends of the scrub or floated free, glinting as they turned and bellied in the windless air, to trick the imagination with the hint of robed, invisible presences. "Oh, Peter, don't you wish it would stay like this always?" "Like this," Peter gave her hand the tiniest squeeze to show what there was about this that he would like to keep. "It's just as good to look at any season though," he insisted. "I was here hunting rabbits last winter, in February, and you could find all sorts of things in the runways where the brambles bent over and kept off the snow; bunches of berries and coloured leaves, and little green fern, and birds hopping in and out." Ada spread her skirts as she sat on a flat boulder and began sticking leaves into Peter's hat. "Peter, what are you going to do this winter?" "I don't know, I should like to go over to the high school at Harmony, but I suppose I'll try to get a place to work near home." "We've been getting up a dancing and singing school, to begin in October. The teacher is coming from Dassonville. It will be once a week; we sing for an hour and then have dancing. It will be cheap as cheap--only two dollars a month. I hope you can come."