From a distance Arnold nodded, and continued to advance, the irregularity of his wavering gait more pronounced than usual.  As soon as she could see the expression of his face, Sylvia’s heart began to beat fast, with a divination of something momentous.  He sat down beside her, took off his hat, and laid it on the bench.  “Do you remember,” he asked in a strange, high voice, “that you said you would like me for your brother?”

She nodded.

“Well, I’m going to be,” he said, and covering his face with his hands, burst into sobs.

Sylvia was so touched by his emotion, so sympathetically moved by his news, that even through her happy ejaculations the tears rained down her own cheeks.  She tried to wipe them away and discovered, absurdly enough, that she had lost her handkerchief.  “Aren’t we idiots!” she cried in a voice of joyful quavers.  “I never understood before why everybody cries at a wedding.  See here, Arnold, I’ve lost my handkerchief.  Loan me yours.”  She pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, she wiped her eyes, she put a sisterly kiss on his thin, sallow cheek, she cried:  “You dears!  Isn’t it too good to be true!  Arnold!  So soon!  Inside two weeks!  How ever could you have the courage?  Judith!  My Judith!  Why, she never looked at a man before.  How did you dare?”

His overmastering fit of emotion was passed now.  His look was of white, incredulous exaltation.  “We saw each other and ran into each other’s arms,” he said; “I didn’t have to ‘dare.’  It was like breathing.”

“Oh, how perfect!” she cried, “how simply, simply perfect!” and now there was for an instant a note of wistful envy in her voice.  “It’s all perfect!  She never so much as looked at a man before, and you said the other night you’d never been in love before.”

Arnold looked at her wildly.  “I said that!” he cried.

“Why, yes, don’t you remember, after that funny, joking talk with me, you said that was the nearest you’d ever come to proposing to any girl?”

“God Almighty!” cried the man, and did not apologize for the blasphemy.  He looked at her fixedly, as though unguessed-at horizons of innocence widened inimitably before his horrified eyes.  And then, following some line of association which escaped Sylvia, “I’m not fit to look at Judith!” he cried.  The idea seemed to burst upon him like a thunder-clap.

Sylvia patted him on the shoulder reassuringly.  “That’s the proper thing for a lover to think!” she said with cheerful, commonplace inanity.  She did not notice that he shrank from her hand, because she now sprang up, crying, “But where’s Judy?  Where is Judy?”

He nodded towards the house.  “She sent me out to get you.  She’s in her room—­she wants to tell you—­but when I saw you, I couldn’t keep it to myself.”  His exaltation swept back like a wave, from the crest of which he murmured palely, “Judith!  Judith!” and Sylvia laughed at him, with the tears of sympathy in her eyes, and leaving him there on the bench staring before him at the living fire of the flame-colored flowers, she ran with all her speed into the house.