He understood her innocence that frankly assumed marriage where a sophisticated girl would, in the guilt of designing thoughts, have shrunk in shame from however vaguely suggesting such a thing. He realized to the full his peril. "I'm a damn fool," he said to himself, "to hang about her. But somehow I can't help it--I can't!" And the truth was, he loved her as much as a boy of his age is capable of loving, and he would have gone on and married her but for the snobbishness smeared on him by the provincialism of the small town and burned in by the toadyism of his fashionable college set. As he looked at her he saw beauty beyond any he had ever seen elsewhere and a sweetness and honesty that made him ashamed before her. "No, I couldn't harm her," he told himself. "I'm not such a dog as that. But there's no harm in loving her and kissing her and making her as happy as it's right to be." "Don't be mean, Susan," he begged, tears in his eyes. "If you love me, you'll let me kiss you." And she yielded, and the shock of the kiss set both to trembling. It appealed to his vanity, it heightened his own agitations to see how pale she had grown and how her rounded bosom rose and fell in the wild tumult of her emotions. "Oh, I can't do without seeing you," she cried. "And Aunt Fanny has forbidden me." "I thought so!" exclaimed he. "I did what I could last night to throw them off the track. If Ruth had only known what I was thinking about all the time. Where were you?" "Upstairs--on the balcony." "I felt it," he declared. "And when she sang love songs I could hardly keep from rushing up to you. Susie, we _must_ see each other." "I can come here, almost any day." "But people'd soon find out--and they'd say all sorts of things. And your uncle and aunt would hear." There was no disputing anything so obvious. "Couldn't you come down tonight, after the others are in bed and the house is quiet?" he suggested. She hesitated before the deception, though she felt that her family had forfeited the right to control her. But love, being the supreme necessity, conquered. "For a few minutes," she conceded. She had been absorbed; but his eyes, kept alert by his conventional soul, had seen several people at a distance observing without seeming to do so. "We must separate," he now said. "You see, Susie, we mustn't be gossiped about. You know how determined they are to keep us apart." "Yes--yes," she eagerly agreed. "Will you go first, or shall I?" "You go--the way you came. I'll jump the brook down where it's narrow and cut across and into our place by the back way. What time tonight?" "Arthur's coming," reflected Susie aloud. "Ruth'll not let him stay late. She'll be sleepy and will go straight to bed. About half past ten. If I'm not on the front veranda--no, the side veranda--by eleven, you'll know something has prevented." "But you'll surely come?"