. . . .  “Two days since I have talked to You in your book after Cora caught me staring at your door and laughed at me—­and ten minutes ago I was sitting beside the actual You on the porch!  I am trembling yet.  It was the first time you’d come for months and months; and yet you had the air of thinking it rather a pleasant thing to do as you came up the steps!  And a dizzy feeling came over me, because I wondered if it was seeing me on the street that day that put it into your head to come.  It seemed too much happiness—­and risking too much—­to let myself believe it, but I couldn’t help just wondering.  I began to tremble as I saw you coming up our side of the street in the moonlight—­and when you turned in here I was all panic—­I nearly ran into the house.  I don’t know how I found voice to greet you.  I didn’t seem to have any breath left at all.  I was so relieved when Cora took a chair between us and began to talk to you, because I’m sure I couldn’t have.  She and poor Ray had been having one of their quarrels and she was punishing him.  Poor boy, he seemed so miserable—­though he tried to talk to me—­about politics, I think, though I’m not sure, because I couldn’t listen much better than either of us could talk.  I could only hear Your voice—­such a rich, quiet voice, and it has a sound like the look you have—­friendly and faraway and wistful.  I have thought and thought about what it is that makes you look wistful.  You have less to wish for than anybody else in the world because you have Yourself.  So why are you wistful?  I think it’s just because you are!

“I heard Cora asking you why you hadn’t come to see us for so long, and then she said:  `Is it because you dislike me?  You look at me, sometimes, as if you dislike me!’ And I wished she hadn’t said it.  I had a feeling you wouldn’t like that `personal’ way of talking that she enjoys—­and that—­oh, it didn’t seem to be in keeping with the dignity of You!  And I love Cora so much I wanted her to be finer—­with You.  I wanted her to understand you better than to play those little charming tricks at you.  You are so good, so high, that if she could make a real friend of you I think it would be the best thing for her that could happen.  She’s never had a man-friend.  Perhaps she was trying to make one of you and hasn’t any other way to go about it.  She can be so really sweet, I wanted you to see that side of her.

“Afterwhile, when Ray couldn’t bear it any longer to talk to me, and in his desperation brazenly took Cora to the other end of the porch almost by force, and I was left, in a way, alone with you what did you think of me?  I was tongue-tied!  Oh, oh, oh!  You were quiet—­but I was dumb!  My heart wasn’t dumb—­it hammered!  All the time I kept saying to myself such a jumble of things.  And into the jumble would come such a rapture that You were there—­it was like a paean of happiness—­a chanting