“When love lights night to be its day.”

I turned from the stricken mother to cough deprecatingly when I had read.  She likewise had the delicacy to turn away and cough.  But an emergency of this momentous import must be discussed in plain terms, however disconcerting the details, and Mrs. Eubanks had nerved herself for the ordeal.

“I can’t think,” she began, “where the boy learned such things!”

I had not the courage to tell her that they might be entirely self-taught under certain circumstances.

“Such shameless, brazen things!” she persisted.  “We have always been so careful of Euty—­striving to keep him—­well, wholesome and pure, you understand, Major Blake.”

“There are always dangers,” I said, but only because she had stopped speaking, and not in any hope of instructing her.

“If only we can keep him from making a fool of himself—­”

“It seems rather late,” I said, this time with profound conviction.  “See there!”

Upon the margin of that captured sheet Eustace had exposed, as it were, the very secret mechanics of his passion.  There were written tentative rhymes, one under another, as “Kate—­mate—­Fate—­late”—­and eke an unblushing “sate.”  Also had he, in the frenzy of his poetic rapture, divined and indicated the technical affinities existing among words like “bliss,” “kiss,” and “miss.”

Interference, however delicately managed, seemed hopeless after that, and I said as much.  But I added:  “Of course, if you let him alone, he may come back to his better self.  Perhaps the young lady herself may prove to be your ally.”

“Indeed not!  She has set out deliberately to ensnare my poor Euty,” said the mother, with an incisive drawing in of her expressively thin lips.  “I knew it the very first evening I saw them together.”

“Mightn’t it have been sheer trifling on her part ?” I suggested.

“Can you imagine that young woman daring to trifle with Eustace Eubanks?” she demanded.

I could, as a matter of fact; but as her query seemed to repel such a disclosure, I lied.

“True,” I said, “she would never dare.  I didn’t think of that.”

“With all her frivolity and lightness of manner and fondness for dress, she must have some sense of fitness—­”

“She must, indeed!”

“She could not go that far!”

“Certainly not!”

“Even if she does wear too many ribbons and laces and fancy furbelows, with never a common-sense shoe to her foot!”

“Even if she does” I assented warmly.

And thus we were compelled to leave it.  In view of those verses I could suggest no plan for relief, and my one poor morsel of encouragement had been stonily rejected.