So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but not daring.  He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of himself.  Had he but known it, he was following the right course with her.  Love came into the world before articulate speech, and in its own early youth it had learned ways and means that it had never forgotten.  It was in this old, primitive way that Martin wooed Ruth.  He did not know he was doing it at first, though later he divined it.  The touch of his hand on hers was vastly more potent than any word he could utter, the impact of his strength on her imagination was more alluring than the printed poems and spoken passions of a thousand generations of lovers.  Whatever his tongue could express would have appealed, in part, to her judgment; but the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way directly to her instinct.  Her judgment was as young as she, but her instincts were as old as the race and older.  They had been young when love was young, and they were wiser than convention and opinion and all the new-born things.  So her judgment did not act.  There was no call upon it, and she did not realize the strength of the appeal Martin made from moment to moment to her love-nature.  That he loved her, on the other hand, was as clear as day, and she consciously delighted in beholding his love-manifestations—­the glowing eyes with their tender lights, the trembling hands, and the never failing swarthy flush that flooded darkly under his sunburn.  She even went farther, in a timid way inciting him, but doing it so delicately that he never suspected, and doing it half-consciously, so that she scarcely suspected herself.  She thrilled with these proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman, and she took an Eve-like delight in tormenting him and playing upon him.

Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing unwittingly and awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by contact.  The touch of his hand was pleasant to her, and something deliciously more than pleasant.  Martin did not know it, but he did know that it was not distasteful to her.  Not that they touched hands often, save at meeting and parting; but that in handling the bicycles, in strapping on the books of verse they carried into the hills, and in conning the pages of books side by side, there were opportunities for hand to stray against hand.  And there were opportunities, too, for her hair to brush his cheek, and for shoulder to touch shoulder, as they leaned together over the beauty of the books.  She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which arose from nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while he desired greatly, when they tired of reading, to rest his head in her lap and dream with closed eyes about the future that was to be theirs.  On Sunday picnics at Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park, in the past, he had rested his head on many laps, and, usually, he had slept soundly and selfishly while the girls shaded his face