“Oh, beautiful!  All pink lace and—­and Cupids, and the picture of a young man and a young woman in a garden.”

“Was that all?”

“Oh, no, there was a verse, in the oddest handwriting.  I wonder who sent it?”

“Perhaps Ralph,” I hazarded ecstatically.

“Ralph couldn’t write poetry,” she replied disdainfully.  “Besides, it was very good poetry.”

I suggested other possible authors and admirers.  She rejected them all.  We reached her gate, and I lingered.  As she looked down at me from the stone steps her eyes shone with a soft light that filled me with radiance, and into her voice had come a questioning, shy note that thrilled the more because it revealed a new Nancy of whom I had not dreamed.

“Perhaps I’ll meet you again—­coming from school,” I said.

“Perhaps,” she answered.  “You’ll be late to dinner, Hugh, if you don’t go....”

I was late, and unable to eat much dinner, somewhat to my mother’s alarm.  Love had taken away my appetite....  After dinner, when I was wandering aimlessly about the yard, Tom appeared on the other side of the fence.

“Don’t ever ask me to do that again,” he said gloomily.

I did meet Nancy again coming from school, not every day, but nearly every day.  At first we pretended that there was no arrangement in this, and we both feigned surprise when we encountered one another.  It was Nancy who possessed the courage that I lacked.  One afternoon she said:—­“I think I’d better walk with the girls to-morrow, Hugh.”

I protested, but she was firm.  And after that it was an understood thing that on certain days I should go directly home, feeling like an exile.  Sophy McAlery had begun to complain:  and I gathered that Sophy was Nancy’s confidante.  The other girls had begun to gossip.  It was Nancy who conceived the brilliant idea—­the more delightful because she said nothing about it to me—­of making use of Sophy.  She would leave school with Sophy, and I waited on the corner near the McAlery house.  Poor Sophy!  She was always of those who piped while others danced.  In those days she had two straw-coloured pigtails, and her plain, faithful face is before me as I write.  She never betrayed to me the excitement that filled her at being the accomplice of our romance.

Gossip raged, of course.  Far from being disturbed, we used it, so to speak, as a handle for our love-making, which was carried on in an inferential rather than a direct fashion.  Were they saying that we were lovers?  Delightful!  We laughed at one another in the sunshine....  At last we achieved the great adventure of a clandestine meeting and went for a walk in the afternoon, avoiding the houses of our friends.  I’ve forgotten which of us had the boldness to propose it.  The crocuses and tulips had broken the black mould, the flower beds in the front yards were beginning to blaze with scarlet and yellow, the lawns had turned a living green.  What did we talk about?  The substance has vanished, only the flavour remains.