perfect, which was implied in that
mysterious overture. He glanced at the stool on which she had been
sitting with a half-brotherly smile, and put it reverently on one side
with a very vivid recollection of her shy maidenly figure. In some
mysterious way too the room seemed to have lost its formal strangeness;
perhaps it was the touch of individuality--HERS--that had been wanting?
He began thoughtfully to dress himself for his regular dinner at the
Poodle Dog Restaurant, and when he left the room he turned back to look
once more at the stool where she had sat. Even on his way to that fast
and famous cafe of the period he felt, for the first time in his
thoughtless but lonely life, the gentle security of the home he had
left behind him.

II.

It was three or four days before he became firmly adjusted to his new
quarters. During this time he had met Cherry casually on the
staircase, in going or coming, and received her shy greetings; but she
had not repeated her visit, nor again alluded to it. He had spent part
of a formal evening in the parlor in company with a calling deacon,
who, unappalled by the Indian shawl for which the widow had exchanged
her household cerements on such occasions, appeared to Herbert to have
remote matrimonial designs, as far at least as a sympathetic
deprecation of the vanities of the present, an echoing of her sighs
like a modest encore, a preternatural gentility of manner, a vague
allusion to the necessity of bearing "one another's burdens," and an
everlasting promise in store, would seem to imply. To Herbert's vivid
imagination, a discussion on the doctrinal points of last Sabbath's
sermon was fraught with delicate suggestion and an acceptance by the
widow of an appointment to attend the Wednesday evening "Lectures" had
all the shy reluctant yielding of a granted rendezvous. Oddly enough,
the more formal attitude seemed to be reserved for the young people,
who, in the suggestive atmosphere of this spiritual flirtation, alone
appeared to preserve the proprieties and, to some extent, decorously
chaperon their elders. Herbert gravely turned the leaves of Cherry's
music while she played and sang one or two discreet but depressing
songs expressive of her unalterable but proper devotion to her mother's
clock, her father's arm-chair, and her aunt's Bible; and Herbert joined
somewhat boyishly in the soul-subduing refrain. Only once he ventured
to suggest in a whisper that he would like to