Circumstance rather than circumspection was accountable for the fact that Macgregor followed the elusive, winding trail of love alone. The tender adventures of our ’teens usually consist in encounters between two boys and two girls; two friends who tacitly admit that they want to meet the girls; two friends who pretend that they do not want to see the boys at any distance; and to sum up, two pairs of young human beings with but a single thought――themselves. Also it may happen, now and then, that for lack of likelier company Prince Charming goes hunting with Master Fathead, while Princess Lilian Rose lays the scent along with Miss Gooseberry, which but adds plausibility to the assumption that neither sex has the courage of its inclinations. For to be honest, there is no cowardice like that of lad’s love; no hypocrisy like that of lass’s. But, surely, you remember! And if so it happened that in your own day you, perforce, fared solitary to the chase, you will sympathise all the more with the unheroic hero of this slight record. In this respect Macgregor was not fortunate in his male friends. The oldest thereof, Willie Thomson, openly contemned the female sex, not omitting his aunt; the others confined their gallantries to the breezy pastimes of pushing girls off the sidewalk, bawling pleasantries after them, and guffawing largely at their own wit or the feminine _repartee_. Their finer instincts were doubtless still dormant. The only mortals worthy of respect were sundry more or less prominent personages whose feet or fists were their fortunes. In these days the adoration of the active by the inert is, one hopes, at its zenith of inflation. Again, to put it now in metaphor, Macgregor’s friends could do with a brass band in scarlet uniform all the time, but they had no use for a secret orchestra of muted strings. All of which was perfectly natural――just as natural as Macgregor’s inexplicable preference for the secret orchestra. Spring comes early or late; the calendar neither foretells nor records its coming. A lad and a lass――how and when and why the one first realises that the other is more than a mere human being are questions without answers. Well, it is a mercy that the world still holds something that cannot be explained away. In one sense this boy was no more refined than his neighbours; in another they were coarser than he. Remains the fact that he followed the trail alone――or thought he did.