echless before him, the pan of red
raspberries in her hands, her raspberry-red lips apart in amazement, and
her eyes gleaming and wide with awe.

She remained vague as to what she answered in the end. It was confusedly
to the effect that though she remembered him well enough, she supposed
that he had long ago forgotten one so insignificant as herself.
Presently he was beside her, dropping raspberries into her pan, while
they laughed together as in those early days when they had picked peas
by her father's permission in Grandpa Thorley's garden.

Their second meeting was accidental--if it was accidental that each had
come to the same spot, at the same hour, on the following day, in the
hope of finding the other. The third meeting was also on the same spot,
but by appointment, in secret, and at night! Claude had been careful to
impress on her the disaster that would ensue if their romance were
discovered.

But Rosie Fay knew what she was doing. She repeated that statement often
to herself. Had she really been a Delphic nymph, or even a young lady of
the best society, she might have given herself without reserve to the
rapture of her idyl; but her circumstances were peculiar. Rosie was
obliged to be practical, to look ahead. A fairy prince was not only a
romantic dream in her dreary life, but an agency to be utilized. The
least self-seeking of drowning maids might expect the hero on the bank
to pull her out of the water. The very fact that she recognized in
Claude a tendency to dally with her on the brink instead of landing her
in a place of safety compelled her to be the more astute.

But she was not so astute as to be inaccessible to the sense of terror
that assailed her every time she went to meet him. It was the fright of
one accustomed to walk on earth when seized and borne into the air.
Claude's voice over the telephone, as she had heard it that afternoon,
was like the call to adventures at once enthralling and appalling, in
which she found it hard to keep her head. She kept it only by saying to
herself: "I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. My father is
ruined; my brother is in jail. But I love this man and he loves me. If
he marries me--"

But Rosie's thoughts broke off abruptly there. They broke off because
they reached a point beyond which imagination would not carry her. If he
marries me! The supposition led her where all was blurred and roseate
and golden, like the mists around the Happy Isles. Ro