“I am leaving the hospital now. It is dusk—the time to meet the hero of one’s adventure. The place of meeting is not far away. It is only a few blocks down Madison from the hospital. I have stolen out in a gypsy dress that I wore at the hospital dance. I have thrown a long dark cloak about me. In the twilight I shall escape—not be snatched up and sent to Bellevue. Don’t worry, Caroline.” Don’t worry! Since the day Dicky became our child (mother’s sister’s only child, a little wailing thing three days old and orphaned of her own mother) I have worried. Now my heart clutches with fear as it clutched the day, now a year past, when Dicky threw into our quiet midst the bomb of her determination to go away from us. Nineteen-year-old Dicky alone in the great city of New York. Our guarded and treasured lambkin thrown into the mouths of wolves. A trained nurse! Under discipline! Dicky, the free, gypsy child of our hearts. We, poor dear old mammy and I, register Dicky’s emotions as faithfully as a trusted thermometer. That Dicky should have to rise with the sun, and, having risen, have to put her own room in order. That Dicky must be silent in the presence of her superiors. It sounds like the court of King James, anyway, and not free America—not that the court of any king would awe Dicky. Once, before we came to live in the mountains, when Dicky was six, we paid a visit to grandmother. Dicky left a saucer of cottage cheese untasted at her plate. Next morning at breakfast it was there, at dinner, at tea. I saw when we went in to tea that the child’s endurance of the saucer of cheese had been reached, and my coward teeth chattered in terror—grandmother had attempted to discipline the child before—the result being that for three interminable days Dicky had appeared at meals, brought down in the arms of grandmother’s old coloured butler, robbed of her clothes and dressed in a royal defiance and a flannel nightgown. Dicky lifted the offending cheese daintily. She didn’t look at me or at grandmother. She spoke to old Benjamin, and she was as perfectly poised and dignified as a little duchess. “Take it away, please,” she said; “it’s spoiled.” “Her mar’s dead, an’ yore mar’s dead,” mammy said one morning as I hurried away to my school teaching; “if you an’ Mr. John can’t an’ won’t do nothin’ to save the child from ruin, mammy will.” I came home the day of mammy’s disciplining of Dicky to find the child digging up the lawn. If we do live in the heart of the Blue Ridge hills I cling to a remembered civilization—the front yard is the lawn. Gypsy curls blowing, gypsy eyes flashing, Dicky with each tiny upflung spade of dirt was shrieking (she couldn’t have been more than seven), “Mr. Devil, Mr. Devil, can you hear? I’m going to keep on digging till I get close enough and you can hear. I want you to shovel mammy into your hot fire and burn her up.”