“Don’t, dear,” said Ellen.  She felt humiliated, and the more so because she was ashamed of being humiliated by her own mother and aunt.  “Why should I be so sensitive to things in which they see no harm?” she asked herself, reprovingly.

As for young Lloyd, he had, ever since he parted with the girl the night before, that sensation of actual contact which survives separation, and had felt the light pressure of her hand in his all night, and along with it that ineffable pain of longing which would draw the substance of a dream to actuality and cannot.  He saw her with her coarsely exultant relatives, the inevitable blur of her environments, and felt himself not so much disillusioned as confirmed.  He had been constantly saying to himself, when the girl’s face haunted his eyes, and her hand in his own, that he was a fool, that he had felt so before, that he must have, that there was no sense in it, that he was Robert Lloyd, and she a good girl, a beautiful girl, but a common sort of girl, born of common people to a common lot.  “Now,” he said to himself, with a kind of bitter exultation, “there, I told you so.”  The inconceivable folly of that glance of the mother at him, then at Ellen, and the meaning laughter, repelled him to the point of disgust.  He turned his back to the window and resumed his work, but, in spite of himself, the pathos of the picture which he had seen began to force itself upon him, and he thought almost tenderly and forgivingly that she, the girl, had not once looked his way.  He even wondered, pityingly, if she had been mortified and annoyed by her mother’s behavior.  A great anger on Ellen’s behalf with her mother seized upon him.  How pretty she did look moving along in that little flower-laden procession, he thought, how very pretty.  All at once a desire for the photograph which would be taken seized him, for he divined the photograph.  However, he said to himself that he would send back the valedictory which he had not yet read by post, with a polite note, and that would be the end.

But it was only the next evening that Robert Lloyd with the valedictory in hand got off the trolley-car in front of the Brewster house.  He had proved to himself that it was an act of actual rudeness to return anything so precious and of so much importance to the owner by the post, that he ought to call and deliver it in person.  When he regained his equilibrium from the quick sidewise leap from the car, and stood hesitating a little, as one will do before a strange house, for he was not quite sure as to his bearings, he saw a white blur as of feminine apparel in the front doorway.  He advanced tentatively up the little path between two rows of flowering bushes, and Ellen rose.

“Good-evening, Mr. Lloyd,” she said, in a slightly tremulous voice.

“Oh, good-evening, Miss Brewster,” he cried, quickly.  “So I am right!  I was not sure as to the house.”

“People generally tell by the cherry-trees in the yard,” replied Ellen, taking refuge from her timidity in the security of commonplace observation, as she had done the night before, giving thereby both a sense of disappointment and elusiveness.