It was a June evening a year later that Stuart Williams sat on the steps of the porch that ran round the side of his house, humoring the fox terrier who thought human beings existed to throw sticks for dogs. After a while the man grew tired of that theory of human existence, and bade the panting Fritz lie down on the step below him. From there Fritz would look up to his master appealingly, eyes and tail saying, "Now let's begin again." But he got no response, so, in philosophic dog fashion, soon stretched out for a snooze. The man was less philosophic: he had not that gift of turning from what he wanted to what he could have. A little later he would go to the rehearsal of the out-of-door play the Country Club was getting ready to give. Ruth Holland would be there: she too was in the play. Probably he would take her home, for they lived in the same neighborhood and a little apart from the others. It was Mrs. Lawrence who, the night of the first rehearsal, commented with relief for one more thing smoothly arranged upon their going the same way. For five weeks now they had been going the same way; their talk on those homeward walks had been the lightest of talk, for the most part a laughing over things that had happened during the rehearsal. And yet the whole world had become newly alive, until tonight it seemed a tremulous, waiting world. That light talk had been little more than a pulling back from the pauses, little more than retreat, safeguard. It was the pauses that lived on with him, creating his dreams; her face as she turned it to him after a silence would sometimes be as if she had been caught into that world touched to new life--world that waited. They would renew the light talk as if coming back from something. He let himself slip into dreaming now; he had told himself that that, at least, could work no one harm, and in quiet hours, when he smoked, relaxed, he was now always drawn over where he knew he must not let himself go. It was as if something stronger than he was all around him. One drooping hand caressed his dog; he drew in the fragrance from a rose trellis near by; the leaves of the big tree moved with a gentle little sound, a sound like the whisper of sweet things; a bird note--goodnight--floated through the dusk. He was a man whom those things reached. And in the last year, particularly in those last weeks, it had come to be that all those things were one with Ruth Holland; to open to them meant being drawn to her.