The high-school in East Westland was an endowed institution.  The principal received twelve hundred a year.  People in the village considered that a prodigious income.  Horace, of course, knew better.  He did not think that sum sufficient to risk matrimony.  Here, too, he was hampered by another consideration.  It was intolerable for him to think of Rose’s wealth and his paltry twelve hundred per year.  An ambition which had always slumbered within his mind awoke to full strength and activity.  He began to sit up late at night and write articles for the papers and magazines.  He had got one accepted, and received a check which to his inexperience seemed promisingly large.  In spite of all his anxiety he was exalted.  He began to wonder if circumstances would not soon justify him in reaching out for the sweet he coveted.  He made up his mind not to be precipitate, to wait until he was sure, but his impatience had waxed during the last few hours, ever since that delicious note of stilted, even cold, praise and that check had arrived.  When Rose had started to go up-stairs he had not been able to avoid following her into the hall.  The door of the parlor stood open, and the whole room was full of the soft shimmer of moonlight.  It looked like a bower of romance.  It seemed full of soft and holy and alluring mysteries.  Horace looked down at Rose, Rose looked up at him.  Her eyes fell; she trembled deliciously.

“It is very early,” he said, in a whispering voice which would not have been known for his.  It had in it the male cadences of wooing music.

Rose stood still.

“Let us go in there a little while,” whispered Horace.  Rose followed him into the room; he gave the door a little push.  It did not quite close, but nearly.  Horace placed a chair for Rose beside a window into which the moon was shining; then he drew up one beside it, but not very close.  He neither dared nor was sure that he desired.  Alone with the girl in this moonlit room, an awe crept over him.  She looked away from him out of the window, and he saw that this same awe was over her also.  All their young pulses were thrilling, but this awe which was of the spirit held them in check.  Rose, with the full white moonlight shining upon her face, gained an ethereal beauty which gave her an adorable aloofness.  The young man seemed to see her through the vista of all his young dreams.  She was the goddess before which his soul knelt at a distance.  He thought he had never seen anything half so lovely as she was in that white light, which seemed to crown her with a frosty radiance like a nimbus.  Her very expression was changed.  She was smiling, but there was something a little grave and stern about her smile.  Her eyes, fixed upon the clear crystal of the moon sailing through the night blue, were full of visions.  It did not seem possible to him that she could be thinking of him at all, this beautiful creature with her pure regard of the holy mystery of the nightly sky; but in reality Rose, being the more emotional of the two, and also, since she was not the one to advance, the more daring, began to tremble with impatience for his closer contact, for the touch of his hand upon hers.