WHEN Gaston tried to sleep, he found it impossible. His brain was on fire, every nerve quivering with some new mysterious power and his imagination soaring on tireless wings. He rolled and tossed an hour, then got up, and sat by his open window looking out over the city sleeping in the still white moonlight. He looked into the mirror and grinned.

“What is the matter with me!” he exclaimed. “I believe I’m going crazy.”

He sat down and tried to work the thing out by the formulas of cold reason. “It’s perfectly absurd to say I’m in love. My wild romancing about a passion that will grasp all life in its torrent sweep is only a boy’s day dream. The world is too prosy for that now.”

Yet in spite of this argument the room seemed as bright as day, and the moon was only a pale sister light to the radiance from the face of the girl he had seen that day. Her face seemed to him smiling close into his now. The light of her eyes was tender and soothing like the far away memory of his mother’s voice.

“It’s a passing fancy,” he said at last, after he had sat an hour dreaming and dreaming of scenes he dared not frame in words even alone. He stood by the window again.

“What a beautiful old world this is after all!” he thought as he gazed out on the tops of the oaks whose young leaves were softly sighing at the touch of the night winds. Turning his eye downward to the street he saw the men loading the morning papers into the wagons for the early mail.

“I wonder what sort of report of my speech they put in?” he exclaimed. Unable to sleep he hastily dressed, went down and bought a paper.

On the front page was a flattering portrait, two columns in width, with a report of his speech filling the entire page, and an editorial review of a column and a half. He was hailed as the coming man of the state in this editorial, which contained the most extravagant praise. He knew it was the best thing he had ever done, and he felt for the minute proud of himself and his achievement. This contemplation of his own greatness quieted his nerves and he fell asleep. He was awakened by the first rolling of carts on the pavements at dawn. He knew he had not slept more than two hours but he was as wide awake as though he had slept soundly all night.

“I must be threatened with that spell of fever Auntie has been worrying about since I was a boy!” he laughed as he slowly dressed.

“It’s now six o’clock, and my train don’t leave till nine,” he mused. “But am I going on that train, that’s the question?”

The fact was, now he came to think of it, there was no need of hurrying home. He would stay a while and look this mystery in the face until he was disillusioned. Besides he wanted to find out what McLeod’s visit meant. He had a vague feeling of uneasiness when he recalled the way McLeod had assumed about the General’s house. He had told Sallie he must hurry home on the morning’s train for no earthly reason than that he had intended to do so when he came.

So after breakfast he wrote her a little note.

“My Dear Miss Worth,

“My train left me. Will you have compassion on a stranger in a strange city and let me call to see you again to-day? Charles Gaston.”

He waited impatiently until he heard his train leave, and then told the boy to make tracks for the General’s house.

A peal of laughter rang through the hall when Sallie’s dancing eyes read that note.

“Oh! the storyteller!” she cried.

And this was the answer she sent back.

“Certainly. Come out at once. I ’ll take you buggy driving all by myself over a lovely road up the river. I do this in acknowledgment of the gracious flattery you pay me in the story you told about the train. Of course I know you waited till the train left before you sent the note. Sallie Worth.”

“Now I wonder if that young rascal of a boy told her I wrote that note an hour ago? I ’ll wring his neck if he did. Come here boy!”

The negro came up grinning in hopes of another quarter.

“Did you tell that young lady anything about when I wrote that note?”

“Na-sah! Nebber tole her nuffin. She des laugh and laugh fit ter kill herse’f des quick es she reads de note.”

Gaston smiled and threw him another tip.

“Yassah, she’s a knowin’ lady, sho’s you bawn, I been dar lots er times fo’ dis!”

Gaston was tempted to ask him for whom he carried those former messages. He walked with bounding steps, his being tingling to his finger tips with the joy of living. The avenue leading the full length of the city toward the General’s house was two miles long before it reached the woods at the gate. It seemed only a step this morning.

As he passed through the cool shade of the woods a squirrel was playing hide and seek with his mate on the old crooked fence beside the road. His little nimble mistress flew up a great tree to its topmost bough and chattered and laughed at her lover as he scrambled swiftly after her. She waited until he was just reaching out his arm to grasp her, and then with another scream of laughter leaped straight out into the air to another tree top, and then another and another until lost in the heart of the forest.

“I wonder if that’s going to be my fate!” he mused as he turned into the gateway.

Again the majestic beauty of that gleaming mass of ivory on the hill with its green background swept his soul with its power. It seemed a different shade of colour now that he saw it with the sun at another angle. Its surface seemed to have the soft sheen of creamy velvet.

He paused and sighed, “Why should I be so poor! If I only had a house like that I’d turn that big banquet hall on the left wing into a library, and I’d ask no higher heaven.”

And he fell to wondering if it would really be worth the having without the face and voice of the girl who was there within waiting for him. No, he was sure of it this morning for the first time in his life. The certainty of this conviction brought to his heart a feeling of loneliness and despair. When he thought of his abject poverty and the long years of struggle before him, and of that beautiful accomplished young woman rich, petted, the belle of the city, the gulf that separated their lives seemed impassable.

“I’m playing with fire!” he said to himself as he looked up at the graceful pillars with their carved and fluted capitals. “Well, let it be so. Let me live life to its deepest depths and its highest reach. It is better to love and lose than never to love at all.” And he walked into the cool hall with the ease and assurance of its master.

Sallie greeted him with the kindliest grace.

“I’m so glad you stayed to-day, Mr. Gaston. I should have been really chagrined to think I made so slight an impression on you that you could walk deliberately away on a pre-arranged schedule. I am not used to being treated so lightly.”

He tried to make some answer to this half serious banter, but was so absorbed in just looking at her he said nothing.

She was dressed in a morning gown of a soft red material, trimmed with old cream lace. The material of a woman’s dress had never interested him before. He knew calico from silk, but beyond that he never ventured an opinion. To colour alone he was responsive. This combination of red and creamy white, with the bodice cut low showing the lines of her beautiful white shoulders and the great mass of dark hair rising in graceful curves from her full round neck heightened her beauty to an extraordinary degree. As she walked, the clinging folds of her dress, outlining her queenly figure, seemed part of her very being and to be imbued with her soul. He was dazzled with the new revelation of her power over him.

“Have you no apology, sir, for pretending that you were going home this morning?” she said seating herself by his side.

“You didn’t ask me to stay with fervour.”

“It ought not to have been necessary.”

“Didn’t you really know I was not going?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.”

“Yes, you see I’m twenty-one years old, and I’ve seen such things happen before!” she purred this slowly and burst into laughter.

“Now, Miss Sallie, that’s cruel to throw me down in a heap of dead dogs I don’t even know.”

“Don’t you like dogs?”

“Four legged ones, yes. But I like my friends alive.”

“Oh! It didn’t kill any of them. They are all strong and hearty. But if you’re so domestic in your tastes why haven’t you settled in life?”

“Been waiting to find the woman of my dreams.”

“And you haven’t found her?”

“Not up to yesterday.”

“Oh! I forgot,” she said archly, “you’re so timid.”

“Honestly, I was.”

“Up to yesterday!” she murmured. “Well, tell me what your dreams demanded? What kind of a creature must she be?”

“I have forgotten.”

“What! Forgotten the dreams of your ideal woman?”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Yesterday.”

“Thanks. We are getting on beautifully, aren’t we? You will get over your timidity in time, I’m sure.”

He smiled, looked down at the pattern of the carpet and did not speak for some minutes. His soul was thrilled and satisfied in her presence. As he lifted his eyes from the floor they rested on the piano.

“Will you play for me, Miss Sallie? Auntie says you play delightfully.”

“Auntie? Who is Auntie?”

“Mrs. Durham, my foster mother, of course. Excuse my unconscious assumption of your familiarity with all my antecedents. I can’t get over the impression that I have known you all my life.”

“And that reminds me that I started to say something to you yesterday that was perfectly ridiculous, but caught myself in time.”

“I wish you had said it.”

“Mrs. Durham is a great flatterer of those she loves. She thinks I can play. But I’m ............