"It HAS been!" Whereupon she made him a laughing little bow.
"You are sure you complain of Canaan?"
"Yes!" he exclaimed. "You don't know what it is to live here—"
"I think I do. I lived here seventeen years."
"Oh yes," he began to object, "as a child, but—"
"Have you any recollection," she interrupted, "of the day before your brother ran away? Of coming home for vacation—I think it was your first year in college—and intervening between your brother and me in a snow-fight?"
For a moment he was genuinely perplexed; then his face cleared. "Certainly," he said: "I found him bullying you and gave him a good punishing for it."
"Is that all you remember?"
"Yes," he replied, honestly. "Wasn't that all?"
"Quite!" she smiled, her eyes half closed. "Except that I went home immediately afterward."