“I told Mrs. Granger that you did it at my request, and there wasn’t a woman in the room who didn’t want to cheer. We all love Maizie, and hate Mrs. Polhemus; and it isn’t a bit because you geese of men think she’s handsome and clever, either. Poor Maizie wanted to be by herself, and went out on the veranda. I think she’s had time enough, and that it’s best for some one to go to her. Won’t you slip out quietly?” I nodded, and instantly she spoke aloud of the moon, and we went to the French window on the pretense of looking at it, where, after a moment, I left her. At first I could not discover you, the vines so shadowed your retreat; and when I did, it was to find you with bowed head buried in your arms as they rested on the veranda rail. The whole attitude was so suggestive of grief that I did not dare to speak, and moved to go away. Just as I turned, however, you looked up, as if suddenly conscious of some presence. “I did not intend to intrude, Miss Walton, and don’t let me disturb you. I will rejoin”— “If you came out for the moonlight and quiet, sit down here,” you said, making room for me. I seated myself beside you, but made no reply, thinking your allusion to quiet perhaps voiced your own preference. “It seems needless,” you began, after a slight pause, “to ignore your kindness, even though it was veiled. I never felt so completely in another’s power, and though I tried to—to say something—to strike back—I couldn’t. Did my face so betray me that you knew I needed help?” “Your face told nothing, it seemed to me.” “But that makes it positively uncanny. Over and over again you appear to divine my thoughts or moods. Do you?” “Little more than any one can of a person in whom one is interested enough to notice keenly.” “Yet no one else does it with me. And several times, when we have caught each other’s eyes, we have—at least I have felt sure that you were laughing with me, though your face was grave.” “Who was uncannily mind-reading then?” “An adequate _tu quoque_,” you said, laughing; then you went on seriously; “Still, to be frank, as now I think we can be, I have never made any pretense that I wasn’t very much interested in you—while you—well—till very lately, I haven’t been able to make up my mind that you did not actually—no, not dislike—for I knew that you—I could not be unconscious of the genuine esteem you have made so evident—yet there has always been, until the last two weeks, an indefinable barrier, of your making, as it appeared to me, and from that I could only infer some—I can give it no name.” “Were there no natural barriers to a friendship between a struggling writer and Miss Walton?” “Surely you are above that!” you exclaimed. “You have not let such a distinction—Oh no, for it has not stood in the way of friendship with the Blodgetts.”