icate
rosiness rising from her cheeks to her temples as the earliest dawn
rises. If there had been many words left in Joe, he would have called
it a divine blush; it fascinated him, and if anything could have
deepened the glamour about her, it would have been this blush. He did
not understand it, but when he saw it he stumbled.

Those who gaped and stared were for him only blurs in the background;
truly, he saw "men as trees walking"; and when it became necessary to
step out to the curb in passing some clump of people, it was to him as
if Ariel and he, enchantedly alone, were working their way through
underbrush in the woods.

He kept trying to realize that this lady of wonder was Ariel Tabor, but
he could not; he could not connect the shabby Ariel, whom he had
treated as one boy treats another, with this young woman of the world.
He had always been embarrassed, himself, and ashamed of her, when
anything she did made him remember that, after all, she was a girl; as,
on the day he ran away, when she kissed a lock of his hair escaping
from the bandage. With that recollection, even his ears grew red: it
did not seem probable that it would ever happen again! The next
instant he heard himself calling her "Miss Tabor."

At this she seemed amused. "You ought to have called me that, years
ago," she said, "for all you knew me!"

"I did know her--YOU, I mean!" he answered. "I used to know nearly
everything you were going to say before you said it. It seems strange
now--"

"Yes," she interrupted. "It does seem strange now!"

"Somehow," he went on, "I doubt if now I'd know."

"Somehow," she echoed, with fine gravity, "I doubt it, too."

Although he had so dim a perception of the staring and whispering which
greeted and followed them, Ariel, of course, was thoroughly aware of
it, though the only sign she gave was the slight blush, which very soon
disappeared. That people turned to look at her may have been not
altogether a novelty: a girl who had learned to appear unconscious of
the Continental stare, the following gaze of the boulevards, the frank
glasses of the Costanza in Rome, was not ill equipped to face Main
Street, Canaan, even as it was to-day.

Under the sycamores, before they started, they had not talked a great
deal; there had been long silences: almost all her questions concerning
the period of his runaway absence; she appeared to know and to
understand everything which had happened since his return to