The Hudson. Theo greeted it now with an uprushing of the heart, as she always did. She adored it with a half-mystical fervor that she could have explained to no one—not even Aaron. She had been born within sound of it, in Albany. Her childhood had been spent near it. Many times it had comforted her with its mighty music.

The clouded May night six years ago when her mother died after months of torturing illness, she had stumbled wildly from the house that held that motionless, sheeted figure, alien now and horrible. Her father was away—the end had been unexpected—and she had no one.

She had flung herself headlong on the shaly shore, sobbing with desperate terror, until, at last, the river had brought peace: the peace of inexorable laws. Dimly she felt its message, translating it through her bewildered child's brain. 'No matter what happens to me, it goes on and on and on. It doesn't care, because it's too big to care. It just is. Like God.'—But God never seemed very real or helpful.

The servants had found her there hours later, asleep beside the river.

But today it was gay and gentle, gracefully balancing its scores of dipping boats. Even the awesome rise of black cliffs on the opposite Jersey shore looked merely picturesque.

Theo stopped at the dairy for a mug of milk, warm and foaming, fresh from the source; and at the stables she found Minerva ready saddled and whinnying her impatience to be off. The gray mare nuzzled her mistress affectionately, and Theo responded with a quick kiss on the satiny nose.

Dick, the Irish stable boy, laced his grimy hands for her to step on in mounting. 'Sure, and you look pretty as a peach, this morning, Miss Theo; your seventeenth birthday will be agreeing with you'. He spoke with the easy familiarity of all white servants in the first years of the Republic.

'Likely you'll be choosing yourself a fine young husband from the elegant throng that's coming to the mansion today'. His little eyes leered at her.

'Likely I won't,' she replied tartly, flicking Minerva, who darted gladly away down the sandy road that wound through the Lispenard Meadows to the East River.

Marrying and husbands! Everyone acted as though she were at least twenty-one and likely to be an old maid. Besides, there was only one person who had the right to bring up these subjects. And her father would never think of such things. They were too happy together, the two of them.