well enough the
difference between his shy awkwardness and her pleasant frankness; and
knew that though he could meet school requirements about as well as
she, yet his mental range was crude and narrow beside hers; and any
one could see that in the town where he was an unknown boy she was an
important young lady. These things would not have counted for much had
not some mediaeval follower of some exiled king dropped down into the
boy's temperament that passion of self-abasing loyalty that is rather
an anachronism in our democratic days. They had been on terms of
friendliness rather than friendship in school, but that was due more
to his shyness than anything else. She had really given to him more
opportunities than to most of her schoolmates; she liked his integrity
and earnestness.

He had looked to college as the natural door between his world and
hers; after four years at New Haven he might seek her acquaintance
without audacity. To that end he had laboriously accumulated money,
and had even passed his matriculation, when his father's death made
him indispensable on the poor little farm. Since then he had doggedly
plodded alone through the college curriculum, but without finding in
it the mysterious pass-word that he had expected into the intellectual
aristocracy. Some two years before, his mother's death and the growing
up of younger brothers had left him free to seek his fortune in
California. At twenty-seven he had lost his fresh look and boyish
shyness; he looked older than he was, but he was really very youthful,
and believed in all sorts of abstractions beginning with capitals.
His mental furniture, being obtained from books, not people, was not
quite in the style of the present decade, and he read Carlyle and
Emerson more than Herbert Spencer. His creed had, therefore, quite
transcendentalism enough to accommodate without incongruity his little
private deification.

Once in every year or two, as opportunity took him near her home, he
had called on her, and had multiplied each call mightily by thinking
of it before and after. He had also kept up a stupid correspondence
with a schoolmate who had lived in the same town with her, for the
chance of her name being mentioned. Within a couple of years, however,
she had lost her father and gone to relatives in New York, so he had
lost exact knowledge even of her whereabouts.

She spoke before he had found his voice--without an instant's
hesitation, indeed. "Oh, Wi