an
she could strike her head against a wall and not be hurt.

She realized more. She realized how keenly she liked being near him.
She realized how often, and for how long, she had been making little
opportunities to stand close, so that her shoulder brushed his. How
often she had contrived a fleeting contact of their hands. And yet if
anybody had tried to tell her that this was the blooming of a perfect
thing to be cherished all her days she would have suffered unutterably
that she had been found out. As it was she suffered sufficiently. She
cried too often into her pillow. But she wasn't yet wholly debased in
her own eyes. That came directly, inevitably.

One Saturday afternoon, urged more enthusiastically by him than she had
ever been urged before, she accompanied him to a gymnasium far uptown.

"I'm keeping in shape, you see," he told her without his usual
diffidence. "I don't know quite why. Everybody says I'm through, but
sometimes I think something may turn up. Enough to bring me a little
stake anyhow. And, anyway, it pays me a little. I'm working out with
Jack English. He's a welter; he's getting ready for a go with Levitt.
I've told you a lot about this business, but you can't judge much just
from talk. I--I'd like to have you come up and watch me box."

There it was, of a sudden. There was his shyness again, so lamely come
upon him that it colored his face. And the halting boyishness of the
request had warmed Cecille's face too; warmed her through and through.
She knew an impulse to hug his head to her breast, a very mature and
motherly impulse.

He had told her much of this business; so much that she hardly recoiled
from it at all. A welter--yes, she understood that. Between a
light-weight and a middle.

But she hesitated so long that he thought he had guessed her objection
and hastened to reassure her.

"There won't be anybody there," he said. "Nobody. Just English and
his trainer and me. You needn't be afraid--"

"I'm not," she stopped him. "It's not--that."

So she went.

CHAPTER VIII

MY LAD

She found herself an hour later in a huge light room, with a floor like
a dance hall and much strange paraphernalia against the walls. Little
of it she was able to identify, though she took it all in with alert
and eager eyes. This was the chiefest part of his life, so she must
not even seem to slight it. The Indian clubs and dumb-bells--but they
were easy. And the rope