of the Christmas vacation, she would be in the office with him often; any opening of the door might bring him; any time she answered the telephone, she might hear his voice.
She thrust her pictures far back in the drawer, then deserted Di for the cafeteria across the street. In spite of the outside cold, which aided other appetites, Ellen wanted only coffee and a roll; and she was shaking, as she served herself, in the ecstasy of her increasing excitement. She drove her mind back to Di. Should she have said more to Di? It was no use talking to Di; something had to be done about her; and the thing could be no easy, futile shift of responsibility such as a letter to Di's father to summon her home.
Di would laugh at the idea of returning home. What would she do at home, especially in the winter? Ellen well knew Di's home, which was neighbor to her own, a quarter mile away across the white hills and deeply drifted dales of Emmet County, Michigan, at the very tip north end of the opposite shore of the roaring, snowswept lake.
Ellen's father lived there because he had been born on the land and because the house, which once had been a farmhouse, was a fine place for the family of a man who had taken to the lakes and who, on a skipper's pay, had a wife and six children.
Adrian Powell was master, now, of the ore-carrier Blenmora, which, from the first day in spring when the ice-breakers cleared a channel through Whitefish Bay until the zero cold of December again "closed" the Soo, must bear iron, iron, iron from Duluth to Chicago. Back and forth, ceaselessly, with the shortest possible delays for loading and discharging ore, the Blenmora must make
