“You—­you took me home?”

“You told me where you lived,” she answered. 
“Yes, I took you home.”

“I don’t understand,” he stammered, huskily. 
“I don’t understand!”

She leaned toward him slightly, looking at him with great intentness.

“You didn’t know me last night,” she said.  “Do you know me now?”

For answer he could only stare at her, dumfounded.  He lifted an unsteady hand toward her appealingly.  But the manner of the lady, as she saw the truth, underwent an April change.  She drew back lightly; he was favored with the most delicious, low laugh he had ever heard, and, by some magic whisk which she accomplished, there was no sign of tears about her.

“Ah!  I’m glad you’re the same, Joe!” she said.  “You never would or could pretend very well.  I’m glad you’re the same, and I’m glad I’ve changed, though that isn’t why you have forgotten me.  You’ve forgotten me because you never thought of me.  Perhaps I should not have known you if you had changed a great deal—­as I have!”

He started, leaning back from her.

“Ah!” she laughed.  “That’s it!  That funny little twist of the head you always had, like a—­ like a—­well, you know I must have told you a thousand times that it was like a nice friendly puppy; so why shouldn’t I say so now?  And your eyebrows!  When you look like that, nobody could ever forget you, Joe!”

He rose from the log, and the mongrel leaped upon him uproariously, thinking they were to go home, belike to food.

The lady laughed again.  “Don’t let him spoil my parasol.  And I must warn you now:  Never, never tread on my skirt!  I’m very irritable about such things!”

He had taken three or four uncertain backward steps from her.  She sat before him, radiant with laughter, the loveliest creature he had ever seen; but between him and this charming vision there swept, through the warm, scented June air, a veil of snow like a driven fog, and, half obscured in the heart of it, a young girl stood, knee-deep in a drift piled against an old picket gate, her black water-proof and shabby skirt flapping in the blizzard like torn sails, one of her hands out-stretched toward him, her startled eyes fixed on his.

“And, oh, how like you,” said the lady; “how like you and nobody else in the world, Joe, to have a yellow dog!”

“Ariel Tabor!”

His lips formed the words without sound.

“Isn’t it about time?” she said.  “Are strange ladies in the habit of descending from trains to take you home?”

Once, upon a white morning long ago, the sensational progress of a certain youth up Main Street had stirred Canaan.  But that day was as nothing to this.  Mr. Bantry had left temporary paralysis in his wake; but in the case of the two young people who passed slowly along the street to-day it was petrifaction, which seemingly threatened in several instances (most notably that of Mr. Arp) to become permanent.