street
with all these flowers, and me in my white dress," she had said. She
had looked at her mother with a shrinking in her eyes which was
incomprehensible to the other coarser-natured woman.

"Nonsense," she had said. "Sometimes you have real silly notions,
Ellen." Fanny said it adoringly, for even silliness in this girl
was in a way worshipful to her. Ellen, with her heart still softened
almost to grief by the love shown her on the day before, had
yielded, but she was glad when they arrived at the photograph
studio. She had particularly dreaded passing Lloyd's, for the
thought came to her that possibly young Mr. Lloyd might see her. She
supposed that he was likely to be in the office. When they passed
the office-windows she looked the other way, but before she was well
past, her aunt Eva hit her violently and laughed loudly. Ellen
shrank, coloring a deep crimson. Then her mother also laughed, and
even Amabel, shrilly, with precocious recognition of the situation.
Only Mrs. Zelotes stalked along in silent dignity.

"Don't laugh so loud, he'll hear you," said she, severely.

"It was that young man who was at the hall last night, and he was
looking at you awful sharp," said little Amabel to Ellen, squeezing
her warm arm, and sending out that shrill peal of laughter again.

"Don't, dear," said Ellen. She felt humiliated, and the more so
because she was ashamed of being humiliated by her own mother and
aunt. "Why should I be so sensitive to things in which they see no
harm?" she asked herself, reprovingly.

As for young Lloyd, he had, ever since he parted with the girl the
night before, that sensation of actual contact which survives
separation, and had felt the light pressure of her hand in his all
night, and along with it that ineffable pain of longing which would
draw the substance of a dream to actuality and cannot. He saw her
with her coarsely exultant relatives, the inevitable blur of her
environments, and felt himself not so much disillusioned as
confirmed. He had been constantly saying to himself, when the girl's
face haunted his eyes, and her hand in his own, that he was a fool,
that he had felt so before, that he must have, that there was no
sense in it, that he was Robert Lloyd, and she a good girl, a
beautiful girl, but a common sort of girl, born of common people to
a common lot. "Now," he said to himself, with a kind of bitter
exultation, "there, I told you so." The inconceivable folly of that
glan