“I should have written to you if I had known, but I was sick in the hospital, and I didn’t—­”

“Sick in the hospital!  Why, Arthur, have you been ill?  What was the matter?”

“A light typhoid fever.  I went to the Wesleyan College, at Montreal, after that, so I didn’t even know you had come back to college.”

“To the Wesleyan?  I thought you were so attached to Victoria!  Whatever made you leave it, Arthur?”

He flushed slightly, and evaded her question.

“Do you know, it was so funny, Arthur, you roomed in the very house where I boarded last fall, and I never knew a thing about it till afterward?  Wasn’t it odd we didn’t meet?”

Again he made some evasive reply, and she had an odd sensation, as of something cold passing between them.  He suddenly became formal, and they turned back again at the bridge where they used to sit fishing, and where Beth never caught anything (just like a girl); they always went to Arthur’s hook.  The two forgot their coldness as they walked back, and Beth was disappointed that Arthur had an engagement and could not come in.  They lingered a moment at the gate as he bade her good-night.  A delicate thrill, a something sweet and new and strange, possessed her as he pressed her hand!  Their eyes met for a moment.

“Good-bye for to-night, Beth.”

May was singing a soft lullaby as she came up the walk.  Only a moment!  Yet what a revelation a moment may bring to these hearts of ours!  A look, a touch, and something live is throbbing within!  We cannot speak it.  We dare not name it.  For, oh, hush, ’tis a sacred hour in a woman’s life.

Beth went straight to her room, and sat by the open window in the star-light.  Some boys were singing an old Scotch ballad as they passed in the street below; the moon was rising silvery above the blue Erie; the white petals of apple-blossoms floated downward in the night air, and in it all she saw but one face—­a face with great, dark, tender eyes, that soothed her with their silence.  Soothed?  Ah, yes!  She felt like a babe to-night, cradled in the arms of something, she knew not what—­something holy, eternal and calm.  And this was love.  She had craved it often—­wondered how it would come to her—­and it was just Arthur, after all, her childhood’s friend, Arthur—­but yet how changed!  He was not the same.  She felt it dimly.  The Arthur of her girlhood was gone.  They were man and woman now.  She had not known this Arthur as he was now.  A veil seemed to have been suddenly drawn from his face, and she saw in him—­her ideal.  There were tears in her eyes as she gazed heavenward.  She had thought to journey to heathen lands alone, single-handed to fight the battle, and now—­“Arthur—­Arthur!” she called in a soft, sweet whisper as she drooped her smiling face.  What mattered all her blind shilly-shally fancies about his nature not being poetic?  There was more poetry buried in that heart of his than