to understand dimly, as one begins to understand any great truth, that everything around her obeyed that unwritten fundamental law of love, expressed it, sounded it, down to the leaves of the trees casting their flickering shadows on the silver field of moonlight, and the long-drawn chorus of the insects of the summer night.  She thought of Abby and how much she loved her; then that love seemed the step which gave her an impetus to another love.  She began to remember Granville Joy, how he had kissed her that night over the fence and twice since, how he had walked home with her from entertainments, how he had looked at her.  She saw the boy’s face and his look as plain as if he stood before her, and her heart leaped with a shock of pain which was joy.

Then she thought of Robert Lloyd, and his face came before her.  Ellen had not thought as much of Robert as he of her.  For some two weeks after his call she had watched for him to come again; she had put on a pretty dress and been particular about her hair, and had stayed at home expecting him; then when he had not come, she had put him out of mind resolutely.  When her mother and aunt had joked her about him she had been sensitive and half angry.  “You know it is nothing, mother,” she said; “he only came to bring back my valedictory.  You know he wouldn’t think of me.  He’ll marry somebody like Maud Hemingway.”  Maud Hemingway was the daughter of the leading physician in Rowe, and regarded with a mixture of spite and admiration by daughters of the factory operatives.  Maud Hemingway was attending college, and rode a saddle-horse when home on her vacations.  She had been to Europe.

But that evening in the moonlight Ellen began thinking again of Robert Lloyd.  His face came before her as plainly as Granville Joy’s.  She had arrived at that stage when life began to be as a picture-gallery of love.  Through this and that face the goddess might look, and the look was what she sought; as yet, the man was a minor quantity.

All at once it seemed to Ellen, looking at her mental picture of young Lloyd, that she could see love in his face yet more plainly, more according to her conception of it, than in the other.  She began to build an air-castle which had no reference whatever to Robert’s position, and to his being the nephew of the richest factory-owner in Rowe, and so far as that went he had not a whit the advantage of Granville Joy in her eyes.  But Robert’s face wore to her more of the guise of that for which the night and the moonlight, and her youth, had made her long.  So she began innocently to imagine a meeting with him at a picnic which would be held some time at Liberty Park.  She imagined their walking side by side, through a lovely dapple of moonlight like this, and saying things to each other.  Then all at once the man of her dreams touched her hand in a dream, and a faintness swept over her.  Then suddenly, gathering shape out of the indetermination of the shadows and the moonlight, came a man into the yard, and Ellen thought with awe and delight that it was he; but instead Granville Joy stood before her, lifting his hat above his soft shock of hair.