CHAPTER I
Half-way up the hill lay the Square. The streets that bounded it on north and south sloped westward to the river. On the east they climbed the hill and disappeared. The elm trees and the ragged willow in the centre of the Square were gray with dust. It was late September.
The place had an air peculiarly its own, representing, in its dignified seclusion, the ideal aspects of an old New England city. Long ago wealthy merchants had built these wide brick houses. Now artists, poets, scholars, and musicians, the builders of houses not made with hands, had become inheritors of the large rooms, with windows overlooking the roofs and chimneys of the city and the winding river in the west.
Late one afternoon Anne Bradford walked slowly home. A sleepy quiet
7
