Page:Possession (1926).pdf/103

 and study in Paris with the great Philippe, you can live with me." For a moment, the girl blushed and regarded the floor silently. "I won't let them," she managed to murmur presently. "Thank you, cousin Lily." It was all that she was able to say.

And when she stepped through the doorway into the cold air, the flames above the furnaces were blurred before her glistening eyes. Lily had promised Paris. That was something; but Paris was a long way off and the road between was certain to be hard. 

HE heavy snow lasted until the day before the New Year when the weather, turning suddenly, sent it slithering away down the gutters of the Town in streams of black water to swell the volume of the Black Fork so that in the Flats, where the stream meandered a tortuous course, it overflowed its banks and filled the cellars of the hovels with stinking damp. It was through this malodorous area that the fastidious carriages of the Town made their way on New Year's Eve to the eminence crowned by Shane's Castle, aglow now with the lights that had flashed into existence upon the arrival of Lily. Kentucky thoroughbreds picked their way daintily through the streaming gutters, drawing behind them the old families of the Town and one or two of the new, for the Shanes, the Barrs and the Tollivers did not, save in cases of rare distinction, admit the existence of the new. Consequently there was no carriage bearing a member of the Seton family. It was this circumstance, far more perhaps than any other, which had precipitated the dinner table crisis of Christmas Day. And its consequences had not ended there; they were destined once more to enter into the existence of Clarence Murdock.

On the same New Year's Eve at about the hour when the gaiety in the house among the mills, centering itself about the re-