Another exodus. But they were scapegoats now, fleeing into the wilderness with a mystic burden of guilt, anonymous guilt; for Immy would not speak. Complete was the contrast between that first flight from the cholera and this fleeing where no man pursued, but all men waited. Then David and Patty RoBards were part of a stampede, striving to save their romance from the plague. Then they were bride and groom; now they carried with them a daughter, unforeseen then, but older to-day than her mother was when she married RoBards. But Immy’s bridegroom was where?—was who? In that other journey to Tuliptree Farm the streets were smothered with dust and the waterless city stifled under a rainless sky. Now water was everywhere. The fountains were still, but the pipes underground were thick as veins and arteries. Water in the form of snow lay on the ground, on the roofs, on the shoulders of the men, on their eyelashes, on the women’s veils and in their hair and the feathers of their hats. It lay in long ridges on the backs of the horses plunging, slipping, falling. It plastered the panes of the lamp-posts and the telegraph-posts that had grown up in a new forest all over town; it lay along the wires that strung spider webs from wall and chimney and tree. The banners that hung from all the shops and stretched across the street were illegible. The busses and the hacks were moving dunes of white. There was a fog of snow. Everybody walked mincingly, except the children, who rejoiced to slide on their brass-toed boots or on the sleds that ran like great, prong-horned beetles among the legs of the anxious wayfarers. The RoBards trio was glad of the snow, for it gave concealment. Immy was silent, morose, and with reason enough. If ever a soul had the right to cry out against the unfairness, the malice of heaven, it was Immy. She could have used the bitter words of Job: “He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.... He will laugh at the trial of the innocent.” She did not feel innocent. She felt worse than wicked; she felt a fool. But other people had been fools and vicious fools and no one learned of it. She had been wicked and foolish before without punishment; with reward rather, laughter, rapture, escape. Now for a flash of insane weakness this sudden, awful, eternal penalty. To her father and mother speech was impossible, thought almost forbidden. If they had been taking Immy’s dead body up to a Westchester burial, they could hardly have felt more benumbed. Only, if she had been dead, the problem of her future would have been God’s. Now it was theirs. The gamble of it was that they could not foreknow the result of this journey; whether it would mean one more life, or one death, or two. In any case, RoBards must hasten back to his legal duties as soon as he had placed Immy on the farm. Patty must stay and share the jail sentence with her for—how long, who could tell?