“Thank you. My excuse is excellent. I only yesterday discovered the identity of the loaner.” “Only yesterday?” she asked carelessly, but with quickening heart. “To be exact, at about eight o’clock last evening.” He dropped his voice and leaned a little further across the barrier. “You see, Miss Hoyt, you fooled me very nicely.” “Excuse me, Mr. Parmley, you fooled yourself. I told you――at least, I never said I was Laura Devereux.” “No, you didn’t, but――I wonder why I was so certain you were! If I hadn’t been――――” “I beg your pardon, Miss Hoyt, but will you please let me have Swinburne’s Poems?” It was the solitary reader. The girl disappeared into the stack room, leaving the two men to a furtive and, on one part at least, amused examination of each other. The pale youth, however, showed no amusement; rather his look expressed suspicion and resentment. Ethan, unable longer to encounter that baleful glare without smiling, turned his head. Then the librarian came with the desired book. “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!” Ethan smiled gently. “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?” “How should I?” she asked weakly.