Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion. "Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know where I am staying?" Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night, arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he was once under the poplars, he did not know what way to look. To seem to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand--near, and then a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly studying his thumb. From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table, and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New Lady came toward him. "You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really." With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own hand. "I hated to come like everything," he said. At this of course she laughed, and she went back to her willow chair and motioned him to his. He got upon it, crimson and wretched. "As much as that!" she observed. "You know I wanted to come awfully, too," he modified it, "but I dreaded it--like sixty. I--I can't explain...." he stumbled. "Don't," said the New Lady, lightly, and took pity on him and rang a little bell. She thought again how fine and distinguished he was, as he had seemed to her on the day when she had first spoken to him. He sat staring at her, trying to realize that he was on the veranda with her, hearing the sound of the little bell she had rung. He had wanted something like this, wistfully, passionately. Miserable as he was, he rested in the moment as within arms. And the time seemed distilled in that little silver bell-sound and the intimacy of waiting with her for some one to come.