'The river's still clear,' Felix murmured.
'All right,' Sheilah acquiesced.
The houses on the hill had become a mass of twinkling pin-pricks when Sheilah and Felix sought the river. The stars in the sky, too. Silently, surreptitiously, the lights above and below had stolen into bloom, like a bed of evening primroses under cover of the dusk. The skaters in the cove had become dim and indistinct—a shadowy, mothlike swarm, that diminished as the night-lights increased, and much in the same baffling manner. It was easy to slip away from the crowd in the cove after it began to grow dark. The girls usually disbanded singly at the end of an afternoon of skating, lost to one another among the purple shapes and shadows of early nightfall.'
The river ran north, away from the lights on Sabin's Hill, towards the lights of the big dipper in the sky, across a bare stretch of meadow-land that was swampy in the spring-time. There were seldom many people on the river. To-night there had been none in spite of the shining ribbon of satin it offered between its alder-shrouded banks.
Sheilah liked to skate with Felix Nawn over long, smooth stretches of glare ice. He could go gloriously fast. There was a rolling, swinging motion about his
