plump admission of partiality for his society fairly staggered Arthur. Again he thought, "She must be quizzing me;" and, to make sure, stole a sidelong glance at her. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, and the pallor and the tense expression of her face indicated that she was laboring under strong excitement. She certainly did not look like one in a quizzing mood.

"I am very much flattered," he managed to say.

"I don't know whether you feel so or not," she replied. "I'm afraid you don't feel flattered at all, but I—I wanted to—tell you."

The pathetic tremor of her voice lent even greater significance to her words than in themselves they would have conveyed.

She was making a dead set at him. There was not a shadow of doubt any longer about that. As the full realization of his condition flashed upon him, entirely alone with her and a long walk before them, the strength suddenly oozed out of his legs, he felt distinctly cold about the spine, and the perspiration started out on his forehead. His tongue clung to the roof of his mouth, and he could only abjectly wonder what was coming next. It appeared that nothing more was coming. A dead silence lasted for several blocks. Every block seemed to Arthur a mile long, as if he were walking in a hasheesh dream. He felt that she was expecting him to say something, to make some sort of response to her advances; but what response, in Heaven's name, could he make! He really could not make love. He had none to make; and had never dreamed of making any to Maud Elliott, of all girls. Yet the idea of letting her suppose him such an oaf as not to understand her, or not to appreciate the honor a lady's preference did him, was intolerable. He could not leave it so.

Finally, with a vague idea of a compromise between the impossible alternative of making love to her, which he could n't, and seeming an insensible boor, which he wouldn't, he laid his disengaged hand upon hers as it rested on his arm. It was his intention to apply to it a gentle pressure, which, while committing him to nothing, might tend to calm her feelings and by its vaguely reassuring influence help to stave off a crisis for the remainder of their walk. He did not, however, succeed in carrying out the scheme; for at the moment of contact her hand eluded his, as quicksilver glides from the grasp. There was no hint of coquettish hesitation in its withdrawal. She snatched it away as if his touch had burned her; and although she did not at the same time wholly relinquish his arm, that was doubtless to avoid making the situation, on the street as they were, too awkward.

A moment before only concerned to evade her apparent advances, Arthur found himself in the position of one under rebuke for offering an unwarranted familiarity to a lady. There was no question that he had utterly misconstrued her previous conduct. It was very strange that he could have been such a fool; but he was quite too dazed to disentangle the evidence just then, and there was no doubt about the fact.

"Pardon me," he stammered, too much overcome with confusion and chagrin to be able to judge whether it would have been better to be silent.

The quickness with which the reply came showed that she had been on the point of speaking herself.

"You need not ask my pardon," she said. Her tones quivered with excitement and her utterance was low and swift. "I don't blame you in the least, after the way I have talked to you to-night. But I did not mean that you should think lightly of me. I have said nothing right, nothing that I meant to. What I wanted to have you understand was that I care for you very much." Her voice broke here, but she caught her breath and went right on. "I wanted you to know it somehow, and since I could not make you know it by ways clever girls might, I thought I would tell you plainly. It really amounts to the same thing; don't you think so? and I know you 'll keep my secret. You need n't say anything. I know you 've nothing to say and may never have. That makes no difference. You owe me nothing merely because I care for you. Don't pity me. I'm not so much ashamed as you 'd suppose. It all seems so natural when it's once said. You need n't be afraid of me. I shall never say this again or trouble you at all. Only be a little good to me; that's all."

She delivered this little speech almost in one breath, with headlong, explosive utterance, as if it were something she had to go through with, cost what it might, and only wanted somehow to get out the words, regardless, for the time, of their manner or effect. She ended with an hysterical sob, and Arthur felt her hand tremble on his arm as she struggled with an emotion that threatened to overcome her. But it was over almost instantly; and without giving him a chance to speak, she exclaimed, with an entire alteration of tone and manner:—

"Did you see that article in the 'Gazette' this morning about the craze for collecting pottery which has broken out in the big cities? Do you suppose it will reach here? What do you think of it?"

Now it was perfectly true, as she had told him, that Arthur had nothing whatever to say in response to the declaration she had made; but all the same it is possible, if she had not just so abruptly diverted the conversation, that he would then and there have placed himself and all his worldly goods at her disposal. He would have done this, although five minutes before he had had no more notion of marrying her than the Emperor of China's daughter, merely because every manly instinct cried out against permitting a nice girl to protest her partiality for him without meeting her half-way. Afterward, when he realized how near he had come to going over the verge of matrimony, it was with such reminiscent terror as chills the blood of the awakened sleep-walker looking up at the dizzy ridge-pole he has trodden with but a hair's breadth between him and eternity.

During the remainder of the way to Maud's door the conversation upon pottery, the weather, and miscellaneous topics was incessant,—almost breathless, in fact. Arthur did not know what he was talking about, and Maud probably no better what she was saying, but there was not a moment's silence. A stranger meeting them would have thought, "What a remarkably jolly couple!"

"I 'm much obliged for your escort," said Maud, as she stood upon her doorstep.

"Not at all. Great pleasure, I 'm sure."

"Good-evening."

"Good-evening." And she disappeared within the door.

Arthur walked away with a slow, mechanical step. His fallen jaw, open mouth, and generally idiotic expression of countenance would have justified his detention by any policeman who might have met him, on suspicion of being a feeble-minded person escaped from custody. Turning the first corner, he kept on with the same dragging step till he came to a vacant lot. Then, as if he were too feeble to get any farther, he stopped and leaned his back against the fence. Bracing his legs before him so as to serve as props, he thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and raising his eyes appealingly to the stars, ejaculated, "Proposed to, by Jove!" A period of profound introspection followed, and then he broke forth: "Well, I 'll be hanged!" emphasizing each word with a slow nod. Then he began to laugh,—not noisily; scarcely audibly, indeed; but with the deep, unctuous chuckle of one who gloats over some exquisitely absurd situation, some jest of many facets, each contributing its ray of humor.

Yet, if this young man had tremblingly confessed his love to a lady, he would have expected her to take it seriously.

Nevertheless, let us not be too severe with him for laughing. It was what the average young man probably would have done under similar circumstances, and it was particularly stated at the outset that there was nothing at all extraordinary about Arthur Burton. For the rest, it was not a wholly bad symptom. Had he been a conceited fellow, he very likely would not have laughed. He would have stroked his mustache and thought it quite natural that a woman should