He was dimly aware of a change that came over these fat people, a strangeness; but he never did realize that at this crisis his eyes, fixed intently upon them and aided by his plastic countenance, had expressed his feelings and sentiments regarding them in the most lively and vivid way. For at the moment when the stout gentleman laid his paper down, preparatory to infuriated inquiry, both he and his wife were expunged from Henry’s consciousness forever and were seen of him thenceforth no more than if they had been ether and not solid flesh. The exquisite girl had been pretending to pick a thread out of her left sleeve with her right hand—but now at last she leaned back in her chair and again turned her face partly toward Henry. Her under lip was caught in slightly beneath her upper teeth, as if she had been doing something that possibly she oughtn’t to be doing, and though the pause in the conversation had been protracted—it is impossible to calculate how long—her charming features were still becomingly overspread with rose. She looked toward her rapt companion, not at him, and her eyes were preoccupied, tender, and faintly embarrassed. The pause continued. He leaned a little closer to her. And he looked at her and looked at her and looked at her. At intervals his lips moved as if he were speaking, and yet he was thinking wordlessly. Leaning thus toward her, his gaze and attitude had all the intensity of one who watches a ninth-inning tie in the deciding game of a championship series. And as he looked and looked and looked, the fat man and his wife, quite unaware of their impalpability, also looked and looked and looked in grateful fascination. “Did you——” Henry Millick Chester finally spoke these words in a voice he had borrowed, evidently from a stranger, for it did not fit his throat and was so deep that it disappeared—it seemed to fall down a coal-hole and ended in a dusty choke. “Did you——” he began again, two octaves higher, and immediately squeaked out. He said “Did you” five times before he subjugated the other two words. “Did you—mean that?” “What?” Her own voice was so low that he divined rather than heard what she said. He leaned even a little closer—and the fat man nudged his wife, who elbowed his thumb out of her side morbidly: she wasn’t missing anything. “Did you—did you mean that?” “Mean what?” “That!” “I don’t know what you mean.” “When you—when you—oh, you know!” “No, I don’t.” “When you—when you took my hand.” “I!” With sudden, complete self-possession she turned quickly to face him, giving him a look of half-shocked, half-amused astonishment. “When I took your hand?” she repeated incredulously. “What are you saying?” “You—you know,” he stammered. “A while ago when—when—you—you——” “I didn’t do anything of the kind!” Impending indignation began to cloud the delicate face ominously. “Why in the world should I?” “But you——”