"Who?"
"Miss Richardson."
"Coming here?"
"Yes. To the Conservatory."
After an interval of thought, Don said: "Oh! I hadn't heard."
When they separated at a street corner, Don thrust both hands deep in his overcoat pockets and paced along alone in a slow absorption of thought; and when he came to the door of the boarding-house, he let himself in without any smiling pause for parting on the threshold.
She was coming back. His "imaginary playmate" was "coming true" again. The news had brought him down to real life with the bewildering shock of a sudden awakening.
III
There intervened his Christmas holiday at home—a momentous holiday; for after the first rush of greetings, he found himself standing before Frankie and his sister, and even his mother herself, a stranger in a life from which he had grown away; and the inevitable readjustment began at once almost with pain. Of them all, his mother had clung most closely to his thoughts, from the day he had opened his trunk—and found his handkerchiefs so fondly packed in tissue papers tied with ribbons—to the day he had received
