Eleanor was certain that she should not close her eyes. She had been waiting hours for this moment, when she might sit down by her window and think of Richard Lister, of the crisp waves of his hair, of his strong young hands which moved so swiftly. It seemed to her that he had played not only upon the piano, but upon her, making her fingers fly faster and more lightly than they had ever moved. Her heart expanded, her soul seemed to burgeon and to bloom. She wanted to think not only of this day's experience, but of the past. She had seen Richard daily at college for four years, she had sat with him in the same classes, but she had never known that he was like this! She had met him, also, coming and going from Thomasina's. He must have made, though she was unconscious of it at the time, a deep impression upon her, because she could recall every motion of his light-stepping figure as he moved from the flag walk to let her pass. She remembered the straight line in which his coat fell from his shoulders as he sat at Thomasina's piano, she could see his flashing smile. She tried to remember the details of the appearance of others, and decided with satisfaction that she had forgotten them. She heard the clock strike twelve, then one, and still she sat by the window, every faculty alert, the heavenly consciousness of expansion and growth growing keener. She remembered hours of discouragement when time moved so slowly and nothing seemed to get done. Now everything moved toward a happy conclusion. The moonlight had never shone so soft, the night air had never been so sweet. After she had gone to bed, a tiny misgiving crept into her pleasant meditations, the forerunner of a score of anxious questions which had long been shaping themselves without her knowledge. For a moment she could not quite grasp the cause, and lay still, her heart beating faster and faster. She had done--she realized it now in a flash--a dreadful thing. In "Professor Ellenborough's Last Class" she had made humorous use of some of the small mannerisms of the college professors. Little habits of Dr. Lister's were described; his constant swinging of his foot, the tendency of his shoelaces to dangle, and his drawing-in of his breath with a click against his cheek. Dr. Scott's den was there, though in reality Eleanor's material was drawn from Dr. Green's office. But she had come since morning to look at Dr. Lister and Dr. Scott from a different angle, and it seemed to her that in using them even to so small an extent she had done a monstrous thing. The isolation of her mother and herself, their complete separation from Waltonville and its citizens, became for the first time a source of anxiety. Hitherto she had been indifferent to the fact that she was almost unacquainted with Mrs. Lister. Now it became a serious matter.