As minute after minute of this hushed, wordless calm continued, Sylvia was aware that something new was happening to her, that something in her stirred which had never before made its presence known.  She felt very queer, a little startled, very much bewildered.  What was that half-thought fluttering a dusky wing in the back of her mind?  It came out into the twilight and she saw it for what it was.  She had been wondering what she would feel if that silent figure opposite her should rise and take her in his arms.  As she looked at that tender, humorous mouth, she had been wondering what she would feel to press her lips upon it?

She was twenty-three years old, but so occupied with mental effort and physical activity had been her life, that not till now had she known one of those half-daring, half-frightened excursions of the fancy which fill the hours of any full-blooded idle girl of eighteen.  It was a woman grown with a girl’s freshness of impression, who knew that ravished, scared, exquisite moment of the first dim awakening of the senses.  But because it was a woman grown with a woman’s capacity for emotion, the moment had a solemnity, a significance, which no girl could have felt.  This was no wandering, flitting, winged excursion.  It was a grave step upon a path from which there was no turning back.  Sylvia had passed a milestone.  But she did not know this.  She sat very still in her chair as the twilight deepened, only knowing that she could not take her eyes from those tender, humorous lips.  That was the moment when if the man had spoken, if he had but looked at her ...

But he was following out some thought of his own, and now rose, went to Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s fine, small desk, snapped on an electric light, and began to write.

When he finished, he handed a bit of paper to Sylvia.  “Do you suppose your sister would be willing to let me make up for the objectionable Charlie Winthrop’s deficiences?” he asked with a deprecatory air as though he feared a refusal.

Sylvia looked at the piece of paper.  It was a check for fifteen thousand dollars.  She held there in her hand seven years of her father’s life, as much money as they all had lived on from the years she was sixteen until now.  And this man had but to dip pen into ink to produce it.  There was something stupefying about the thought to her.  She no longer saw the humor and tenderness of his mouth.  She looked up at him and thought, “What an immensely rich man he is!” She said to him wonderingly, “You can’t imagine how strange it is—­like magic—­not to be believed—­to have money like that!”

His face clouded.  He looked down uncertainly at his feet and away at the lighted electric bulb.  “I thought it might please your sister,” he said and turned away.

Sylvia was aghast to think that she had perhaps wounded him.  He seemed to fear that he had flaunted his fortune in her face.  He looked acutely uncomfortable.  She found that, as she had thought, she could say anything, anything to him, and say it easily.  She went to him quickly and laid her hand on his arm.  “It’s splendid,” she said, looking deeply and frankly into his eyes.  “Judith will be too rejoiced!  It is like magic.  And nobody but you could have done it so that the money seems the least part of the deed!”