“Here we are!” they sighed, with a hollow note that bespoke the nervous feel in their stomachs. The carriage door flung open. They bounded out and ran up the stoop. Josiah half-lifted, half-pushed Quincy to the pavement. He stood there, balanced by his bewilderments, while his father paid the coachman. “Come on, sir,” the big man tapped his shoulder. The carriage had disappeared. Quincy looked up. Before him was an unbroken but uneven battlement of houses. Some were brown, some were red, some were grey. At their feet ran the wide, flagstoned pavement. Some were straight-stepped, some were curved, some were curiously decorated boxes. A few had no feet at all--with doorways punched abruptly in the wall. Before Quincy’s eyes it was brown; the protuberance with stairs was straight. Red doors were flung wide open--held so for passage of the trunks--and within was darkness. Above, it was all very vague and high. Quincy felt this, though he did not look. He went up mechanically, with his father. As he stepped in, he felt a quick sensation of the sky--shrill blue, inexorably far away, yet good. It seemed like a short draught of water when one has been long athirst. It was but a momentary glimpse. And then, his body carried him beyond, within, where the sky was not. He saw the long hall, shadowed, and the wide stairs. It seemed clear to him now why it had been as if the sky was snuffed away. Everything loomed forward and smothered Quincy; filled up the crystal space within him that cared for the blue above and seemed somehow related to it. Everything loaded down upon him, occupied him, stayed there. As he trudged up, it was as if a mighty burden had come suddenly. Quincy observed no more, felt nothing more explicit. But for an instant a perspective flashed on him, though he deemed it merely a natural panic like a score of others he had undergone. In it, he saw himself, slight, small, stooped, his head strained back with his disordered tension, his legs careering stiffly with untrained, superfluous energy. In it, he saw about him a weight of gloom--the stuff and color of this house which was to be his home. And then, once more, he was a child. His mother stood at the head of the stairs. She was very busy, and rather dirty-looking. “You had better go up to your room, dear, where you won’t be in the way.” She turned to Jonas who sat sprawling within vision, upon a great chair in green satin. “Jonas, will you take Quincy up?” “Sure,” replied the boy. “Come along, Kid.” It was easy to tell that what interested Jonas was the chance of showing. So they were still to share a room? Quincy learned this, as he took in the two white-enameled beds and the valise with “J.B.” upon it that he stumbled over as he entered. The sight of his mother and this new event which scarcely he had dared to hope for, seemed to enliven Quincy. He had not given up Jonas. He had had his pangs from him, as from his mother.