HE was on the train at last homeward bound. Gazing out of the window of the car he was trying to find where he stood. He must be in love. He faced the remarkable fact that he had spent a whole week in Independence at an expensive hotel, and squandered every cent of the small fee he had received for his address in what would be otherwise a perfectly senseless manner.

Yet he felt rich. He was sure he had never spent money so wisely and economically in his life. Beyond the shadow of a doubt he was in love,—desperately and hopelessly committed to this one girl for life. He said it in his heart with a shout of triumph. Life was not a sterile desert of brute work. It was true. Love the magician of the ages, lived in this world of lost faiths and dead religions.

Now that he was leaving he felt a tingling impulse to leap off the train, cut across the fields and run back to her—and he laughed aloud, just as the train came to a sudden stop, and everybody looked at him and smiled.

A drummer looked up from a novel he was reading and said, “It is a fine day, partner, isn’t it?”

“Never saw a finer,” answered Gaston with another laugh.

He dwelt long and greedily on the consciousness of this new vitalising secret he felt for the first time throbbing in his soul. He bathed his heart in its warmth until he could feel the red blood rush to the ends of his fingers with its new fever. He breathed its perfume until every nerve quivered. “I have never lived before. No matter now if I die, I have lived!” he said slowly and reverently.

He wondered long and wistfully what was in her heart while this wild tumult was going on in him. He wondered if it were possible she loved him. It seemed too good to be true. He was afraid to believe it. And yet his whole soul with every power of his being cried out that she did. He could not have been mistaken in the message he read in the liquid depths of her eyes, and the delicate tenderness of her voice. Words may say nothing, but these signs are the language of the universal. Still, others had been equally sure, and been deceived. Might not he too make the fatal mistake? It was possible. And there was the pain.

She had not uttered a single word in all the hours they spent together that might not be interpreted in a conventional meaningless way.

Yet he had given to every one of these words a soul meaning that spoke directly to his inner being and not his ear.

He had never spoken a word of shallow love-making to a woman in his life. To him love was too holy a mystery. It would have been the blasphemy of the Holy Ghost—a sin that would not be forgiven in this world or the world to come. His college mates had called him a crank on this subject. But he shut his lips in a way that always closed the argument, and they let him alone with his Idol.

“I am afraid yet to put it to the test!” he said at last. “I must have time to reveal my best self to her. I must see her again, live close to her day by day, and bring to bear on her every power of body and soul I possess.” Mrs. Durham met him with dancing eyes. “Oh, I’ve heard from you, sir!”

“Kiss me Auntie, and be kind. I’m in the last stages of delirium!”

He took her hands both in his and looked at her long. “How good you’ve been to me, Auntie, in all the past. You never looked so beautiful as to-day. I want to thank you for every word you’ve said to Miss Sallie for me. It may have helped just a little anyway.”

“Well you are in the last stages!” she exclaimed gleefully.

“And you are glad of it?”

“Of course, I am, it will make a man of you.”

“But suppose I lose?”

She was silent a moment and then slipped her arm gently about him, drew down his ear and whispered, “You shall not lose—I’ve set my heart on it.”

He pressed her hands and said, “How like my sweet mother’s voice was that!”

And then they fell to discussing plans for giving Miss Sallie and her friend a jolly time at the Springs.

“But Auntie, these plans don’t seem to me exactly what I’d like. You see I want to be the whole thing. It may be hopelessly selfish, but I can’t help it.”

“Well that isn’t best.”

“Say Auntie, what do I look like anyway? How would you describe my make up? Let’s get at the weak spots and splint them up a little. You know, I never seriously cared a rap before about my looks.”

“Well”—she answered, slowly regarding him, “I ’ll be perfectly frank with you.

“You are tall—at least two inches taller than the average man, and your muscular body gives one the impression of power. You have black hair, dark-brown eyes that l............