"Oh, let him!" cried Vance derisively. He took a quick glance at the Jewish girl in rimless glasses, saw that she had turned away to pass a box of Fuller's marshmallows down the line, and flinging his arm about Laura Lou, kissed her fervently.

She paled a little and shrank back, but so submissively, with such an air of leaving herself on his lips even though she withdrew her own, that he thought exultantly: "She knows she belongs to me," and had there been room in his breast for any feeling but rapture it would have been pity for the tight-faced young man bellowing through his megaphone: "We are now approaching the only remaining private residence on Fifth Avenue, belonging to one of the old original society leaders known throughout the world as the Four Hundred."

Chapter 3

The next day, when Vance got out of the train at Paul's Landing, the old horses in the broken-down carry-alls were still standing in the station square, shaking their heads despondently.

He jumped on board a passing trolley and was carried out of the town. At the foot of a familiar lane overhung by bare maple boughs he got out and began to climb to the Willows. Laura Lou had said she would bring the key of the gate with her. She couldn't let him into the house, she explained: since the theft of the books (which had been brought back, as she supposed Vance knew) Mrs. Tracy had kept the house key hidden away where no one could get it. But Vance was determined at least to see the garden and the outside of the house again, and the day was so windless and mild that they would be able to sit in the sun on the verandah. He wanted to relive his first visit to the Willows, when he had accompanied Laura Lou and Upton, and had lingered spellbound in the library while Laura Lou, her hair covered with a towel, went off with Upton to dust and air the rooms. That day Vance had hardly noticed her, had felt her presence only as that of a tiresome schoolgirl, butting in where she wasn't wanted, like his own sisters, Pearl and Mae—especially Pearl. And now—!

She was at the gate already; he caught sight of her through the branches, in the powdery gold of the autumn light. She waved to him, and opened the gate; and he followed her in. "No, you mustn't!" she whispered, as his arms went out, and added, laughing: "With all the leaves off the bushes—and that hired man around."

"Curse the hired man! Can't we go and talk quietly somewhere?"

He was looking at her as though to store up the sight against a coming separation, and yet he knew already that he never meant to leave her again. "Can't I hold your hand, at least?" he asked, awed by something so tender and immature in her that it curbed his impetuousness.