She was my first love, and I loved her as only a boy loves.  I dreamed of her, I built air castles for her, she was the incarnation of each beautiful heroine I knew; when I played the piano, it was to her, not even music furnished an adequate outlet for my passion; I bought a new note-book and, to sing her praises, made my first and last attempts at poetry.  I remember one day at school, after we had given in our notebooks to have some exercises corrected, the teacher called me to her desk and said:  “I couldn’t correct your exercises because I found nothing in your book but a rhapsody on somebody’s brown eyes.”  I had passed in the wrong note-book.  I don’t think I have felt greater embarrassment in my whole life than I did at that moment.  I was ashamed not only that my teacher should see this nakedness of my heart, but that she should find out that I had any knowledge of such affairs.  It did not then occur to me to be ashamed of the kind of poetry I had written.

Of course, the reader must know that all of this adoration was in secret; next to my great love for this young lady was the dread that in some way she would find it out.  I did not know what some men never find out, that the woman who cannot discern when she is loved has never lived.  It makes me laugh to think how successful I was in concealing it all; within a short time after our duet all of the friends of my dear one were referring to me as her “little sweetheart,” or her “little beau,” and she laughingly encouraged it.  This did not entirely satisfy me; I wanted to be taken seriously.  I had definitely made up my mind that I should never love another woman, and that if she deceived me I should do something desperate—­the great difficulty was to think of something sufficiently desperate—­and the heartless jade, how she led me on!

So I hurried home that afternoon, humming snatches of the violin part of the duet, my heart beating with pleasurable excitement over the fact that I was going to be near her, to have her attention placed directly upon me; that I was going to be of service to her, and in a way in which I could show myself to advantage—­this last consideration has much to do with cheerful service——.  The anticipation produced in me a sensation somewhat between bliss and fear.  I rushed through the gate, took the three steps to the house at one bound, threw open the door, and was about to hang my cap on its accustomed peg of the hall rack when I noticed that that particular peg was occupied by a black derby hat.  I stopped suddenly and gazed at this hat as though I had never seen an object of its description.  I was still looking at it in open-eyed wonder when my mother, coming out of the parlor into the hallway, called me and said there was someone inside who wanted to see me.  Feeling that I was being made a party to some kind of mystery, I went in with her, and there I saw a man standing leaning with one elbow on the mantel, his back partly turned toward the door.