that—she could not know what—which she had determined to do to help hold the Alban business and Lew.
"Hot to-day," Di offered a neutral subject.
"The water's all blue," said Ellen, accepting it. "You can't see ice anywhere now." The floe in the lake, she meant, viewed from the high vantage of the office windows. "It's breaking up in the straits, mother says. Father's in Duluth." With his ship, she meant, loading with iron ore to be ready for the first break through of the ice in Lake Superior and the opening of Sault Ste. Marie—"The Soo."
In a week or two, possibly more but maybe less, for it depended on elements far beyond man's contrast she might spy from the office window the long, low hull of the laden Blenmora with its iron for South Chicago. Slowly, steadily, unswerving, straight to its course the ship would appear from the north, pass far out and slowly, with her eyes lingering upon it, lessen and lessen and vanish; and that night, near the ore slips of the Calumet, Ellen would sup with her father.
"I'll be glad to see father," she said to Di, who knew all this.
"Uhuh," agreed Di, with head down. "You would."
Di did not want to see her father, nor her mother. Di did not, in these days, discuss her family. Except for mention of the money she sent home, she never brought up the subject of Hoster. She tossed back her auburn curls and, as upon the night when momentarily she had dropped beside her bed, Di arose whistling. From the closet she produced such a gown of the new spring mode
