He drew back, dropping her hands, and restricting himself to the more delicate delight of looking at her. "What's the use of trying to write poetry, when she is?" he mused. Yet in another moment he was again seeking rhymes and metaphors for her. He tried to explain to himself what it was that kept him thus awestruck and submissive, as if there were a latent majesty in her sweetness. With that girl on Thundertop it had been different; the shock of ideas, the stimulus of the words she used, the allusions she made, the sense of an unknown world of beauty and imagination widening about him as she talked—all this had subdued his blood while it set his brain on fire. But when Laura Lou spoke she became a child to him again. His allusions to his literary plans and ambitions filled her eyes with a radiant sympathy, but evoked nothing more definite than: "Isn't that too lovely, Vance?" Yet his feeling for her was not the sensual hunger excited by girls like Floss Delaney. It was restrained by something new in this tender creature; as if the contending elements of body and soul were so harmonized in her that to look at her was almost to clasp her.

But the air grew chilly; Vance noticed that she had turned paler; she coughed once or twice. The instinct of protection woke in him. "See here, we mustn't go on sitting here till you catch cold. Where'll we go? Why don't we walk back to the town to warm ourselves up, and have a cup of hot coffee before I catch my train?" She assented, and they turned toward the gate. As Laura Lou stooped to the padlock Vance looked back yearningly at the old house. "We'll come here often now, won't we?"

The gate had closed on them, and Laura Lou walked on a few steps before answering. "Oh, I don't know about coming again, Vance. I had hard work getting the key out of Mother's drawer without her seeing me… . Besides, I'm not here weekdays; I'm at school."

"Your mother can't object to our coming here after we're married," Vance tranquilly rejoined.

"Married?" she stood still in the lane and looked at him with wide incredulous eyes. Her pale pink lips began to tremble. "Why, how can we be, Vance?"

"Why can't we be, I'd like to know? I'll be earning enough soon." (He was sincerely convinced of it.) "See here, Laura Lou, I want to begin life in New York married to you. I'm coming out to tell your mother and Upton about it tomorrow. You won't go back to school till Monday, will you? Can I come out early tomorrow, and have dinner with you?"

A shade of apprehension crossed her face. "Oh, Vance darling—not tomorrow."

"Why not?"

"Because it's Sunday, and Sunday's Bunty's day." She made the statement with a sort of tragic simplicity, as a fact to be neither disguised nor eluded.