the glove, which she had half on, to meet his big, rough grasp.
"You didn't get down to home," he said.
Home for her, when he mentioned it, was not her room with Di; it was really home—her home with the light in the windows, the sparks streaking in the night from the chimney as the sled hauled you up the snowy hill in the clear, creaking cold of the starlit silence at the other end of the lake. How blue and sharp, in the still zero air, would be the stars to-night; and now and then, sudden and loud: Crack! Crack! The cold was snapping the ice in the frozen strait.
Denny's home was near by in Hoster. Denny, once, had been on the boats and had shipped for a season on the Blenmora with her father. He had abandoned the lakes for the city and was become a clerk in an insurance office; yet the sight of him and the firm, friendly hold of his red hand and his shy, bass voice overwhelmed her with homesickness here in the heated hall of an office building on Christmas eve.
"Goin' down to-night?" he questioned her.
There was his "goin' down" again, in the homely speech of her own people, of her father who would be home, home to-night. She could hear him laugh and call; she could see him, in the exuberance of his strength, swing little mother off her feet and sweep her against his breast, kiss her, and hold her higher and then let her to her feet; gently, so gently.
The lake people, her own people, her father said "down" when others, the city people, said up." Up north, the city dwellers went. The lake people journeyed and
