keen eye for young talent, and the event
had been to her as truly the pinnacle of romance as a betrothal would
have been to another girl. It had shed a veritable glory over life for
her, and all her dreams were now of further triumphs, of approving
editors and an applauding public. She would be a famous woman, she
told herself, with the naive assurance of youth. That was her destiny!

So it was small wonder, after all, that Shadyville lads had not induced
her to regard them seriously. She would marry some time, of course.
Everyone married--at least in Shadyville, where the elemental
simplicities of existence prevailed for very lack of its complexities.
There was really nothing to do in Shadyville except to participate, in
one capacity or another, in birth, marriage and death. Sheila
therefore considered marriage an inescapable end, but she thought very
little about it along the way thither.

And yet, when the hour of sex romance finally struck for Sheila, when,
for the first time, she realized love's moving power and beauty, her
surrender to it was tenfold quicker and more unquestioning than would
have been that of a girl who had dallied with sentiment from the days
of her short frocks. Her very years of indifference were her undoing.
Owing to them, love came to her with the shock of an instant and
supreme revelation; she who had been blind suddenly beheld a whole
undreamed of world, as it were, and the vastness of the vision
inevitably dazed her to a degree that made clear perception of it
impossible.

Perhaps Sheila would have been less ingenuously innocent, and more
effectually prepared for this crisis, had Charlotte Davis been at hand
during the formative period of her girlhood. But Charlotte had been
traveling in Europe for a couple of years, and her letters--clever,
witty, worldly-wise--were too infrequent to equip Sheila for the
defense of her heart. So she went forward--profoundly unconscious,
pitifully unready--to capture.

She was nineteen years old, and the season was summer, and the moon was
shining--when it began. And summer is an opulent thing in Kentucky; a
blue and golden thing by day; a thing of white witchery by night; and
whether in the burnished glamour of the sun, or the pallid glamour of
the moon, too sweet, too full-blooded, too poignant with the forces and
the purposes of nature to leave the pulse unstirred.

Sheila, restless with this earth-magic, was standing at the garden gate
o