ng and braced
herself to meet it. The mystical hour, the silver-bathed wonder of the
night, a girl's frightened curiosity, combined to win her to a
listening mood. She felt on the eve of a painful but necessary ordeal,
and clasped her hands together to bear it creditably. Through the
perturbation of her mind the question flashed--Did all women feel this
way? and then the comment, How much they had to endure that they never
told!

It was the first time any man had made the great demand of her. She
had read of it in novels and other girls had told her. From this data
she had gathered that it was a happy if disturbing experience. She
felt only the disturbance. Seldom in her life had she experienced so
distracting a sense of discomfort. When David was half way through she
would have given anything to have stopped him, or to have run away.
But she was determined now to stand it, to go through with it and be
engaged as other girls were and as her father wished her to be.
Besides there was nowhere to run to and she could not have stopped him
if she had tried. He was launched, the hour had come, the, to him,
supreme and awful hour, and all the smothered passion and hope and
yearning of the past month burst out.

Once she looked at him and immediately looked away, alarmed and abashed
by his appearance. Even in the faint light she could see his pallor,
the drops on his brow, the drawn desperation of his face. She had
never in her life seen anyone so moved and she began to share his
agitation and wish that anything might happen to bring the interview to
an end.

"Do you care? Do you care?" he urged, trying to look into her face.
She held it down, not so much from modesty as from an aversion to
seeing him so beyond himself, and stammered:

"Of course I care. I always have. Quite a great deal. You know it."

"I never knew," he cried. "I never was sure. Sometimes I thought so
and the next day you were all different. Say you do. Oh, Susan, say
you do."

He was as close to her as he could get without touching her, which, the
question now fairly put, he carefully avoided doing. Taller than she
he loomed over her, bending for her answer, quivering and sweating in
his anxiety.

The young girl was completely subdued by him. She was frightened, not
of the man, but of the sudden revelation of forces which she did not in
the least comprehend and which made him another person. Though she
vaguely understood that