The woman smiled. "It is almost a forest; it runs south for a block. And beyond there is the loveliest meadow, all tender green now. Over there you can see the Everglade School, where I spend my days. The people are Swedes, mostly,--operatives in the factories at Grand Crossing and on the railroads. Many of the children can scarcely understand a word of English,--and their habits! But they are better than the Poles, in the Halsted Street district, or the Russians in another West Side district. And we have a brick building, not rooms rented in a wooden house. And the principal is an old woman, too fat to climb all the stairs to my room. So I am left alone to reign among my young barbarians." When they reached the grove, Mrs. Preston crossed the car tracks and entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,--the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding villages with Chicago. An old German had lived in it, Mrs. Preston explained, until his death a year or two ago. He had a little chicken farm. As no one else wanted to live in such a desolate place, so far from the scattered hamlets, she had got it for a small rent. The house was a tiny imitation of a castle, with crenelated parapet and tower. Crumbling now and weather-stained, it had a quaint, human, wistful air. Its face was turned away from the road toward a bit of garden, which was fenced off from the lane by arbors of grape-vines. Sommers tied his horse to the gate post. Mrs. Preston did not speak after they reached the house. Her face had lost its animation. They stood still for some time, gazing into the peaceful garden plot and the bronzed oaks beyond, as if loath to break the intimacy of the last half hour. In the solitude, the dead silence of the place, there seemed to lurk misfortune and pain. Suddenly from a distance sounded the whirr of an electric car, passing on the avenue behind them. The noise came softened across the open lot--a distant murmur from the big city that was otherwise so remote. The spring twilight had descended, softening all brutal details. The broad horizon above the lake was piled deep with clouds. Beyond the oak trees, in the southern sky, great tongues of flame shot up into the dark heavens out of the blast furnaces of the steel works. Deep-toned, full-throated frogs had begun their monotonous chant. CHAPTER VIII "Shall we go in?" the doctor asked at last.