The girl’s inclemency stirred him as frosty weather stimulates energy. So they followed. I doubt if they were aware themselves that the distance lengthened between them and other groups of this congregation, which divided and dwindled at every street corner. Lovers are recognized on sight, long before they know themselves to be lovers. People make room for their privacy in public places. These two had a whole block to themselves by the time they entered Wiggs Street. Mrs. Adams had already disappeared in her house. The broad back of Mr. Cutter and the slim back of little Mrs. Cutter were visible for a moment before they also faded through the doorway of the Cutter residence. Only the Flitches stood _en masse_ on their spider-legged veranda, their eyes glued upon these two stragglers, coming slowly down the sunlit street. The Flitches were good people, of the round-eyed breed. They had a candid, perpetually interrogative curiosity which nothing could satisfy. You know the kind. It is never you, but the family that lives across the street from you, or in the next house with thin eyelid curtains over their windows through which they are perpetually regarding you, striving after omniscience about you and your affairs. Helen had admitted that it was a “nice day” when he said it was, as they came out of the church and faced the fair brow of this June sabbath. He had told her how much he enjoyed her solo. It was wonderful. She merely replied that she “liked to sing.” He was still conscious of being in the arctic region of her regard and cast about, with a lover’s distracted compass, to discover the way out. “Weren’t you in the bank yesterday afternoon?” he asked suddenly. “Yes,” she answered coldly after a slight pause; “I was about to speak to you, but you did not recognize me,” she added. “It is the truth. I did not,” he admitted quickly and waited. He could not be sure she got it, the compliment implied. He remembered her as merely sensible, not smart. “You have changed, grown or something,” he resumed. “I couldn’t be expected to know you. All the other girls here look just as they did when I left here two years ago. But you don’t; you are amazingly different. How did you do it?” he exclaimed, regarding her with charmed amazement. He saw her take it, caught the glance she gave him one instant before she dropped it. The faintest smile sweetened the comers of her mouth. He got that too. If only he had known of the tears she had shed after the visit to the bank, what a triumph! Fortunately, men do not know what maidens confess with tears to their pillows. If they did it would change many a courtship to one kind or another of ruthless tyranny.