“Don’t be too sure. She’s just sizing you up. She’s done the same thing a dozen times before.” “I don’t believe it.” And he didn’t go home until the end of the week when the last cent of his money was gone. CHAPTER VII--DREAMS AND FEARS HE was on the train at last homeward bound. Gazing out of the window of the car he was trying to find where he stood. He must be in love. He faced the remarkable fact that he had spent a whole week in Independence at an expensive hotel, and squandered every cent of the small fee he had received for his address in what would be otherwise a perfectly senseless manner. Yet he felt rich. He was sure he had never spent money so wisely and economically in his life. Beyond the shadow of a doubt he was in love,--desperately and hopelessly committed to this one girl for life. He said it in his heart with a shout of triumph. Life was not a sterile desert of brute work. It was true. Love the magician of the ages, lived in this world of lost faiths and dead religions. Now that he was leaving he felt a tingling impulse to leap off the train, cut across the fields and run back to her--and he laughed aloud, just as the train came to a sudden stop, and everybody looked at him and smiled. A drummer looked up from a novel he was reading and said, “It is a fine day, partner, isn’t it?” “Never saw a finer,” answered Gaston with another laugh. He dwelt long and greedily on the consciousness of this new vitalising secret he felt for the first time throbbing in his soul. He bathed his heart in its warmth until he could feel the red blood rush to the ends of his fingers with its new fever. He breathed its perfume until every nerve quivered. “I have never lived before. No matter now if I die, I have lived!” he said slowly and reverently. He wondered long and wistfully what was in her heart while this wild tumult was going on in him. He wondered if it were possible she loved him. It seemed too good to be true. He was afraid to believe it. And yet his whole soul with every power of his being cried out that she did. He could not have been mistaken in the message he read in the liquid depths of her eyes, and the delicate tenderness of her voice. Words may say nothing, but these signs are the language of the universal. Still, others had been equally sure, and been deceived. Might not he too make the fatal mistake? It was possible. And there was the pain. She had not uttered a single word in all the hours they spent together that might not be interpreted in a conventional meaningless way. Yet he had given to every one of these words a soul meaning that spoke directly to his inner being and not his ear.