ack to
me, of her dark hair in a long braid tied with a red ribbon, of her
slender legs clad in black stockings of shining silk. We felt the
occasion to be somehow too significant, too eloquent for words....

In silence we climbed the flight of stone steps that led up to the
Blackwood mansion, when suddenly the door was opened, letting out sounds
of music and revelry. Mr. Blackwood's coloured butler, Ned, beamed at us
hospitably, inviting us to enter the brightness within. The shades were
drawn, the carpets were covered with festal canvas, the folding
doors between the square rooms were flung back, the prisms of the
big chandeliers flung their light over animated groups of matrons and
children. Mrs. Watling, the mother of the Watling twins--too young to be
present was directing with vivacity the game of "King William was King
James's son," and Mrs. McAlery was playing the piano.

"Now choose you East, now choose you West,
Now choose the one you love the best!"

Tom Peters, in a velvet suit and consequently very miserable, refused
to embrace Ethel Hollister; while the scornful Julia lurked in a corner:
nothing would induce her to enter such a foolish game. I experienced
a novel discomfiture when Ralph kissed Nancy.... Afterwards came the
feast, from which Ham Durrett, in a pink paper cap with streamers, was
at length forcibly removed by his mother. Thus early did he betray his
love for the flesh pots....

It was not until I was sixteen that a player came and touched the keys
of my soul, and it awoke, bewildered, at these first tender notes. The
music quickened, tripping in ecstasy, to change by subtle phrases into
themes of exquisite suffering hitherto unexperienced. I knew that I
loved Nancy.

With the advent of longer dresses that reached to her shoe tops a change
had come over her. The tomboy, the willing camp-follower who loved me
and was unashamed, were gone forever, and a mysterious, transfigured
being, neither girl nor woman, had magically been evolved. Could it be
possible that she loved me still? My complacency had vanished; suddenly
I had become the aggressor, if only I had known how to "aggress"; but
in her presence I was seized by an accursed shyness that paralyzed my
tongue, and the things I had planned to say were left unuttered. It was
something--though I did not realize it--to be able to feel like that.

The time came when I could no longer keep this thing to myself. The need
of an o