If Myra came to-day he would tell her.  The very thought gave his heart a lovely quake of fear, a trembling that communicated itself to his hands and down his legs, a throbbing joy dashed with a strange tremor.  And then as he wanted, as he wished for, the door beside him opened and the bell sharply sounded.

She stood there, very small, very slight, but quite charming in her neat, lace-touched clothes.  A fringe at the wrist, a bunch at the neck, struck her off as some one delicate and sensitive, and the face strengthened this impression.  It was long and oval, with a narrow woman-forehead cut off by a curve of dark hair; the mouth was small and sweet; the nose narrow; the eyes large, clear gray, penetrating.  Under the gracefully modeled felt hat she stood quite complete, quite a personality.  One instantly guessed that she was an aristocrat by birth and breeding.  But her age was doubtful, seeming either more or less than the total, which was thirty-two.

There she stood, glancing at Joe with a breathless eagerness.  He turned pale, and yet at the same time there was a whirl of fire in his heart.  She had come to him; he wanted to gather her close and bear her off through the wild autumn weather, off to the wilderness.  He reached out a hand and inclosed a very cold and very little one.

“Why, you’re frozen!” he said, with a queer laugh.

“Oh—­not much!” she gasped.  She held her leather bag under her arm and took off her gloves.  Then she loosened her coat, and gave a sigh.

He gazed at her warm-tinted cheek, almost losing himself, and then murmured, suddenly: 

“More school stuff?”

She made a grimace and tried to speak lightly, but her voice almost failed her.

“Class 6-B, let me tell you, is giving the ‘Landing of the Pilgrims,’ and every blessed little pilgrim is Bohemian.  Here’s the programme!”

With trembling fingers she opened her bag and handed him some loose sheets.  He bent over them at once.

“Now make it cheap, Mr. Blaine,” she said, severely.  “Rock bottom!  Or I’ll give the job to some one else.”

Joe laughed strangely.

“How many copies?”

“One thousand.”

He spoke as if in fear.

“Fifty cents too much?”

Myra laughed.

“I don’t want the school to ruin you!”

He said nothing further, and in the awkward silence she began pitifully to button her coat.  There was no reason for staying.

Then suddenly he spoke, huskily: 

“Don’t go, Miss Craig....”

“You want ...” she began.

He leaned very close.

“I want to take a walk with you.  May I?”

She became dead white, and the terror of nature’s resistless purpose with men and women, that awful gravitation, that passion of creation that links worlds and uses men and women, went through them both.

“I may?” he was whispering.