Again he was scarcely conscious of what he was saying or leaving unsaid, and suddenly waked to the fact that his hostess had hurried away, and that the plain girl was in his care. After all, she was Eperson's sister, and he eyed her curiously, wondering if she, too, were his enemy. "You've met my brother," she began. "He spoke about it the day the corner-stone was laid. There he is out there with Tilly now. I didn't want to come to-night, but he was crazy to be here so that he could see her." "I thought that was it," John permitted his slow lips to say. "They have been going together a long time. That is, I've heard so." "Yes, and I thought--we all thought that Tilly would end up by taking him, but it is all off now," Miss Eperson sighed, her eyes on the pair at the fence. "All off?" John in his sober senses would have wondered at his ability to talk so freely with a girl he had just met. "Why, what do you mean?" "As if you didn't know--as if _everybody_ doesn't know!" Martha Jane laughed half sardonically. "But I don't know what you mean." Something new and bountiful in its promise of joy filled John and drove the words from his palpitating tongue. "The idea!" scoffed Martha Jane. "Well, if you don't know it you are blind as a bat in daytime. Brother knows it, I know it--everybody knows it." "Knows what?" John demanded, his breath checked, his eyes gleaming, his whole being athrob under the dawn of an ecstasy the plain girl seemed to offer. "Well, I'm not going to tell you, if you don't know," the girl answered, with a little shrug. "But if you want to understand, watch my poor brother. He never had a look like that before. She has been his very life. People that doubt real love ought to know Joel. He would go through fire and water for Tilly. He'd steal, he'd kill, he'd do anything. He is desperate to-night. When we got to her house and found that you and she were going to walk out here, it was the last straw. But he is a gentleman, my brother is, and he will never make a row over it." Under the sheer blaze of this information, John stood speechless. He, boldly now, gave his arm to his little companion and they started to walk back and forth on the lawn as others were doing. His face was now turned from Tilly, but subconsciously he could fairly feel her proximity. John almost loved the little woman on his arm. How could he help it? She was so kind to him. They were turning toward the steps when Tilly and Eperson approached. There was a wilted look of resignation on Eperson's face, a sentient animation in Tilly's eyes and about her lips, when she said to John: "I hope you are having a good time and meeting all the girls. Sally said she would look after you." He smiled and nodded. Something seemed to bear down on his brain and befog his sight. The lights, the lawn, the people, swirled around him. "Yes, I'm all right," he said.