“Thank you, Miss Hoyt!” said the reader. With a final glance of dawning enmity at Ethan he returned to his solitude. Ethan looked inquiringly at Cicely.
“He’s perfectly awful!” she replied despairingly. “He stays here hours and hours at a time. I don’t believe he ever eats anything. And he calls for books incessantly, from Plutarch’s Lives to――to Swinburne! I think he is trying to read right through the catalogue. And a while ago he came for――what do you think?――The Anatomy of Melancholy!”
“I wouldn’t be too hard on him,” he said. “The poor devil is head-over-heels in love with you.”
The phrase brought recollections――and a blush.
“Nonsense! He’s just a boy!” she answered.
“Boys sometimes feel pretty deeply――for the while,” he replied. “And judging from his present line of reading, I’d say that the while hasn’t passed yet.”
“It’s so silly and tiresome!” she said. “He gets terribly on my nerves. He――he sighs――in the most heartbreaking way!” She laughed a little nervously. Then a moment of silence followed.
“Clytie,” he began,――“I am going to call you that to-day, for I haven’t got used to thinking of you as Cicely yet――do you know why I came?”
“To return the book,” she answered smilingly.
“No, not altogether. I came to ask you something.”
“I ought to feel flattered, oughtn’t I? It’s quite a ways here from Providence, isn’t it?”
“Supposing we don’t pretend,” he answered gravely. “We’ve gone too far to make that possible, don’t you think? And I’ve had a beast of a summer,” he added inconsequently. “I thought――do you know what I thought, dear?”
“I thought you were Laura Devereux, and that day when you didn’t come I went for you and saw you and Vincent on the porch. And afterwards he told me he was engaged to Miss Devereux, and――don’t you see what it meant to me? And yesterday I found out, quite by accident, and――” he reached across and seized her hand with a little laugh of sheer happiness――“I haven’t slept a wink since! I――I thought I’d never get here; the roads were quagmires!”
“Oh, why did you come?” she asked miserably.
“Why? Good Heaven, don’t you know, girl?” He leaned across and she felt his lips on the hand still clasped in his.
“Yes, yes, I know,” she cried. “But――you mustn’t love me! You won’t when I’ve told you!”