to him that he had done the direct and courageous
thing, that she would understand and be grateful to him for his
frankness. Each morning he heard the rustle of the mail slipping under
the door with a sudden cold foreboding, certain that her letter had
come. Each evening, back from the grind of the factory, he came into the
monastic corridors of Westover Court and turned the corner of the desk
with a hot-and-cold hope that in the letter-box there, under the number
51, would be a letter waiting for him. When after a week no word had
come, he began to make excuses. She was away on a visit, her mail had to
be forwarded or more probably held for her return. But one day,
happening to glance at the social column, in a report of the Berkshires
he found her name as a contender in a tennis tournament. He wrote a
second note:

Dear Patsie:

Did you get my letter of ten days ago, and won't you write
me?

Yours,
BOJO.

Perhaps his first had miscarried. Such accidents were rare but yet they
did occur. He calculated the shortest time she could receive his letter
and answer it and waited expectantly all that day. Again a week passed
and no word from her. What had happened? Had he really blundered in
sending the first letter? Was her pride hurt, or what? A feeling of
despair began to settle over him. He did not attempt a third letter,
sick at heart. The thought that he might have wounded her--he always
imagined her as a child--was unbearable. It hurt him as it had hurt him
with a haunting sadness, the day after their wild toboggan ride, when he
had seen the pain in her eyes--eyes that were yet too young for the
knowledge of the sorrow and ugliness of the world. Finally, through a
chance remark one day when he had dropped in to his club, he learned
that she was to be present at a house party at Skeeter Stoughton's on
Long Island. Overlooking the incident of his unsuccessful attempt to
enter their employ, he took his friend into a half confidence and begged
him to secure him an invitation for over Sunday.

When he was once on the train and he knew for certain that in a short
two hours he would look into her eyes again, a feeling almost of panic
seized him. When they were in the motor rushing over smooth white roads
and he felt the lost distances melting away beneath him, this feeling
became one of the acutest misery. All that he had carefully planned and
rehearsed to say to her, suddenly deserted his mind.

"W