trunk and putting her clothes away. Her fox terrier, whom the
family, for obscure reasons, called the Pig, arrived in the middle
of the afternoon in a crate, and shivering with the chill of the
house, was tied up behind the kitchen range, where, for all the
heat, he still trembled and shuddered at long intervals, his head
down, his eyes rolled up, bewildered and discountenanced by so much
confusion and so many new faces.

Outside the weather continued lamentable. The rain beat down
steadily upon the heaps of snow on the grass-plats by the
curbstones, melting it, dirtying it, and reducing it to viscid
slush. The sky was lead grey; the trees, bare and black as though
built of iron and wire, dripped incessantly. The sparrows, huddling
under the house-eaves or in interstices of the mouldings, chirped
feebly from time to time, sitting disconsolate, their feathers
puffed out till their bodies assumed globular shapes. Delivery
wagons trundled up and down the street at intervals, the horses and
drivers housed in oil-skins.

The neighborhood was quiet. There was no sound of voices in the
streets. But occasionally, from far away in the direction of the
river or the Lake Front, came the faint sounds of steamer and tug
whistles. The sidewalks in either direction were deserted. Only a
solitary policeman, his star pinned to be outside of his dripping
rubber coat, his helmet shedding rivulets, stood on the corner
absorbed in the contemplation of the brown torrent of the gutter
plunging into a sewer vent.

Landry and Laura were in the library at the rear of the house, a
small room, two sides of which were occupied with book-cases. They