His lips were opened to tell her of her own beauty, but something restrained him, some perception of maidenly dignity that enfolded her and made her more than the girl who had waited on the table.

“You were a polite little boy,” she recalled, filling the breach made by his silence.  “I remember that you carried me across the street, to save my slippers from the wet.  I thought you were wonderful.  I have never forgotten.”

Neither had Van Alen forgotten.  It had been a great feat for his little strength.  There had been other boys there, bigger boys, but he had offered, and had been saved humiliation by her girlish slimness and feather weight.

“I was a strong little fellow then,” was his comment:  “I am a strong little fellow now.”

She turned on him reproachful eyes.  “Why do you always harp on it?” she demanded.

“On what?”

“Your size.  You twist everything, turn everything, so that we come back to it.”

He tried to answer lightly, but his voice shook.  “Perhaps it is because in your presence I desire more than ever the full stature of a man.”

He was in deadly earnest.  Hitherto he had been willing to match his brain, his worldly knowledge, his ancestry, against the charms of the women he had met; but here with this girl, standing like a young goddess under the wide, sunset sky, he felt that only for strength and beauty should she choose her mate.

He wondered what he must seem in her eyes; with his shoulder on a level with hers, with his stocky build that saved him from effeminacy, his carefulness of attire—­which is at once the burden and the salvation of the small man.

As for his face, he knew that its homeliness was redeemed by a certain strength of chin, by keen gray eyes, and by a shock of dark hair that showed a little white at the temples.  There were worse-looking men, he knew, but that, at the present moment, gave little comfort.

She chose to receive his remark in silence, and, as they came to a path that branched from the road, she said: 

“I am going to help take care of a child who is sick.  You see I am mistress of all trades—­nurse, waitress, charwoman, when there is nothing else.”

He glanced at her hands.  “I cannot believe that you scrub,” he said.

“I sit up at night to care for my hands”—­there was a note of bitterness in her tone—­“and I wear gloves when I work.  There are some things that one desires to hold on to, and my mother and my grandmother were ladies of leisure.”

“Would you like that—­to be a lady of leisure?”

She turned and smiled at him.  “How can I tell?” she asked; “I have never tried it.”

She started to leave him as she said it, but he held her with a question:  “Shall you sit up all night?”

She nodded.  “His mother has had no sleep for two nights.”

“Is he very ill?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders.  “Who knows?  There is no doctor near, and his mother is poor.  We are fighting it out together.”