She clung to him, looking up at him just as his boy-dreams had told him a girl _would_ look some day. Her face was suffused and softened, her lips—her coral-red, fine, lovely lips were trembling, and her eyes were as gray, as profound as those seas his imagination had longed to explore. Made poet for the first time in his life, as his arms were around her, he whispered: “You are all my dreams come true. If any man comes near you I’ll kill him just as sure as fate. I’ll kill him!” “Hush, hush! I told you you were crazy. We’re both perfectly mad. I have tried my best not to come to this with you. What would your father say? Let me go, let me go; I’ll call Higgins.” The boy laughed aloud, the laugh of happy youth. He held her so close that she might as well have tried to loose herself from an iron image of the Spanish Inquisition as from his young arms. This slender, delicious, willowy thing he held was Letty Lane, the adored star London went mad over: the triumph of it! It flashed through him as his pulses beat and his heart was high with the conquest, but it was to the woman only that he whispered: “I’ve said a lot of stuff and I am likely to say a lot more, but I want you to say something to me. _Don’t you love me?_” The word on his lips to him was as strange, as wonderful, as though it had been made for him. “I guess I must love you, Dan. I guess I must have for a long time.” “God, I’m so glad! How long?” “Why, ever since you used to come to the soda-fountain and ask for chocolate. You don’t know how sweet you were when you were a little boy.” She put her slender hand against his hot cheek. “And you are nothing but a little boy now! I think I must be crazy!” As he protested, as she listened intently to what his emotion taught him to say to her, she whispered close to his ear: “What will _you_ take, little boy?” And he answered: “I’ll take you—you!” At a slight sound in the next room Letty Lane started as though the interruption really brought her to her senses, put her hand to her disheveled hair, and before she could prevent it, Dan had called Mrs Higgins to “come in,” and the woman, in response, came into the sitting-room. The boy went up to her and took her hands eagerly, and said: “It’s all right, all right, Mrs. Higgins. Just think of it! She belongs to me!” “Oh, don’t be a perfect lunatic, Dan,” the actress exclaimed, half laughing, half crying, “and don’t listen to him, Higgins. He’s just crazy.” But the old woman’s eyes went bright at the boy’s face and tone. “I never was so glad of anything in my life.” “As of what?” asked her mistress sharply, and the tone was so cold and so suddenly altered that Dan felt a chill of despair. “Why, at what Mr. Blair says, Miss.” “Then,” said her mistress, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself. He’s only twenty-two, he doesn’t know anything about life. You must be crazy. He’s as mad as a March hare and he ought to be in school.”