She could have gone down on her knees to thank the fatherly superintendent for letting her stay, only she was just a little bit frightened at his easy ways, so different from any she had been used to. She did not like for him to catch her hand and hold it so tight when he was talking to her, and look so deep into her eyes with admiration that made her blush. She had noticed that he had the same way with others--always young and pretty ones--and only yesterday she had spoken to dashing Miss Blue about it. “Don’t you think he is too familiar with us girls, catching our hands so tight and looking in our eyes that queer way?” naively. Miss Blue laughed lightly. “Oh, the doctor means no harm. He is just jolly and fatherly. He always has his little joke with me when I go in his office at night to make my report. Besides, if we were to resent his little cordialities we might lose our positions.” “I see,” little Eva answered quickly, and now that she was engaged as an attendant, too, she thought: “I would have thanked him more cordially, only I didn’t want him to catch my hand and squeeze it tight, and look at me as if he thought that I was very pretty! Somehow I don’t believe his wife would like it. She seems cold enough, especially to that Miss Blue that the doctor is always chaffing.” She had wandered away by herself, out of sight and hearing of the poor lunatics disporting themselves in the sunshine, and now she sat down beneath a tree to rest, a lovely picture on which one man’s eyes rested in rapture, as if he, too, like the superintendent, thought her pretty. He came slowly to her side. “Do I intrude, Miss Somerville?” She glanced up into the eyes of Doctor Rupert, deeply, darkly, beautifully blue, behind the glasses he habitually wore, and met a winning smile. Her cheeks dimpled and turned a warm pink as she faltered: “Oh, no. Will you have a seat?” He sat down on the bench at the farthest end, not to startle her, and held out a bunch of pansies. “The gardener just gave them to me. Aren’t they lovely? Will you have them?” Their hands touched as she accepted them, and a thrill of pleasure shook either heart. She had been thinking him handsome a long time, in spite of the glasses and the long curling hair down on his coat collar, that gave him rather an elderly air, though the eyes behind the glasses were quite young and merry. “Why does it always seem to me as if I had met you before I came here? Where did you come from?” “Ohio!” he replied, with a quickened heart throb. “Then it must be only my fancy. I have certainly never been to Ohio, or anywhere else,” naively. “Yet the first moment we met, even when I was a little off in my head, you know, you did not seem like a stranger to me, but as if you somehow belonged to my past.” “We have perhaps met in some former periods of existence, and you recognize me as a former soulmate. That is my theory. What is yours?”