arge.
In spite of all his anxiety he was exalted. He began to wonder if
circumstances would not soon justify him in reaching out for the
sweet he coveted. He made up his mind not to be precipitate, to wait
until he was sure, but his impatience had waxed during the last few
hours, ever since that delicious note of stilted, even cold, praise
and that check had arrived. When Rose had started to go up-stairs he
had not been able to avoid following her into the hall. The door of
the parlor stood open, and the whole room was full of the soft
shimmer of moonlight. It looked like a bower of romance. It seemed
full of soft and holy and alluring mysteries. Horace looked down at
Rose, Rose looked up at him. Her eyes fell; she trembled deliciously.

"It is very early," he said, in a whispering voice which would not
have been known for his. It had in it the male cadences of wooing
music.

Rose stood still.

"Let us go in there a little while," whispered Horace. Rose followed
him into the room; he gave the door a little push. It did not quite
close, but nearly. Horace placed a chair for Rose beside a window
into which the moon was shining; then he drew up one beside it, but
not very close. He neither dared nor was sure that he desired. Alone
with the girl in this moonlit room, an awe crept over him. She looked
away from him out of the window, and he saw that this same awe was
over her also. All their young pulses were thrilling, but this awe
which was of the spirit held them in check. Rose, with the full white
moonlight shining upon her face, gained an ethereal beauty which gave
her an adorable aloofness. The young man seemed to see her through
the vista of all his young dreams. She was the goddess before which
his soul knelt at a distance. He thought he had never seen anything
half so lovely as she was in that white light, which seemed to crown
her with a frosty radiance like a nimbus. Her very expression was
changed. She was smiling, but there was something a little grave and
stern about her smile. Her eyes, fixed upon the clear crystal of the
moon sailing through the night blue, were full of visions. It did not
seem possible to him that she could be thinking of him at all, this
beautiful creature with her pure regard of the holy mystery of the
nightly sky; but in reality Rose, being the more emotional of the
two, and also, since she was not the one to advance, the more daring,
began to tremble with impatience for his closer co