"We haven't told any one yet--but I wanted to make sure of the job. It's all right, then, isn't it?" "Oh, yes, it's all right, if you do your part. She's Gabriel Pendleton's girl, isn't she?" "She's Virginia Pendleton. You know her, of course." He tried honestly to be natural, but in spite of himself he could not keep a note of constraint out of his voice. Merely to discuss Virginia with Cyrus seemed, in some subtle way, an affront to her. Yet he knew that the old man wanted to be kind, and the knowledge touched him. "Oh, yes, I know her. She's a good girl, and there doesn't live a better man than Gabriel." "I don't deserve her, of course. But, then, there never lived a man who deserved an angel." "Ain't you coming in?" asked Cyrus. "Not this evening. I only wanted to speak to you. I suppose I'd better go down to the office to-morrow and talk to Mr. Burden, hadn't I?" "Come about noon, and I'll tell him to expect you. Well, if you ain't coming in, I reckon I'll close this door." Looking up a minute later from the pavement Oliver saw his aunt rocking slowly back and forth at the window of her room, and the remembrance of her fell like a blight over his happiness. By the time he reached High Street a wind had risen beyond the hill near the river, and the scattered papers on the pavement fled like grey wings before him into the darkness. As the air freshened, faces appeared in the doors along the way, and the whole town seemed drinking in the cooling breeze as if it were water. On the wind sped, blowing over the slack figure of Mrs. Treadwell; blowing over the conquering smile of Susan, who was unbinding her long hair; blowing over the joy-brightened eyes of Virginia, who dreamed in the starlight of the life that would come to her; blowing over the ghost-haunted face of her mother, who dreamed of the life that had gone by her; blowing at last, beyond the river, over the tired hands of the little seamstress, who dreamed of nothing except of how she might keep her living body out of the poorhouse and her dead body out of the potter's field. And over the town, with its twenty-one thousand souls, each of whom contained within itself a separate universe of tragedy and of joy, of hope and of disappointment, the wind passed as lightly it passed over the unquiet dust in the streets below. BOOK II THE REALITY CHAPTER I VIRGINIA PREPARES FOR THE FUTURE "Mother, I'm so happy! Oh! was there ever a girl so happy as I am?" "I was, dear, once."