In every man’s life there is generally one moment to which in later years he can look back and say:  “In this moment I fell in love!” Such a moment came to Ashe now.

          Betwixt the stirrup and the ground,
          Mercy I asked; mercy I found.

So sings the poet and so it was with Ashe.

In the almost incredibly brief time it took the small but sturdy porter to roll a milk can across the platform and hump it, with a clang, against other milk cans similarly treated a moment before, Ashe fell in love.

The word is so loosely used, to cover a thousand varying shades of emotion—­from the volcanic passion of an Antony for a Cleopatra to the tepid preference of a grocer’s assistant for the Irish maid at the second house on Main Street, as opposed to the Norwegian maid at the first house past the post office—­the mere statement that Ashe fell in love is not a sufficient description of his feelings as he stood grasping Mr. Peters’ steamer trunk.  Analysis is required.

From his fourteenth year onward Ashe had been in love many times.  His sensations in the case of Joan were neither the terrific upheaval that had caused him, in his fifteenth year, to collect twenty-eight photographs of the heroine of the road company of a musical comedy which had visited the Hayling Opera House, nor the milder flame that had caused him, when at college, to give up smoking for a week and try to read the complete works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

His love was something that lay between these two poles.

He did not wish the station platform of Market Blandings to become suddenly congested with red Indians so that he might save Joan’s life; and he did not wish to give up anything at all.  But he was conscious—­to the very depths of his being—­that a future in which Joan did not figure would be so insupportable as not to bear considering; and in the immediate present he very strongly favored the idea of clasping Joan in his arms and kissing her until further notice.

Mingled with these feelings was an excited gratitude to her for coming to him like this, with that electric smile on her face; a stunned realization that she was a thousand times prettier than he had ever imagined; and a humility that threatened to make him loose his clutch on the steamer trunk and roll about at her feet, yapping like a dog.

Gratitude, so far as he could dissect his tangled emotion was the predominating ingredient of his mood.  Only once in his life had he felt so passionately grateful to any human being.  On that occasion, too, the object of his gratitude had been feminine.

Years before, when a boy in his father’s home in distant Hayling, Massachusetts, those in authority had commanded that he—­in his eleventh year and as shy as one can be only at that interesting age—­should rise in the presence of a roomful of strangers, adult guests, and recite “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”