“Say, listen, Martie.  My sister Ida’s going to-night, and one or two others, and Mrs. Cliff Frost is going to chaperon us afterward; ask your mother if that’s all right.”

The girl wasted no time on her mother, but crossed to the library door.

“Pa,” said she without preamble, “Mrs. Cliff Frost is chaperoning some of them after the theatre tonight.  Can I go?”

“Go where?  Shut that door,” her father said, half turning.

“Oh—­I don’t know; to the hotel, I suppose.”

“Yes,” her father said in a dry voice.  “Yes,” he added unwillingly.  “Go ahead.”

So the evening was a great success; one of the memorable times.  Martie and Rodney walked ahead of her sisters down town, the boy gallantly securing the girls’ tickets before he and Martie went up the aisle to their own seats.  All Monroe was in the Opera House.  Martie bowed and smiled radiantly.  Rodney’s sister and Mrs. Frost and a strange man presently returned her smile.

“Rod—­wouldn’t you rather be with your own family?”

“Well—­what do you think?”

The enchantment of it, the warmth and stimulus of his admiration, his absorbed companionship, how they changed the world for Martie!  There was a witchery in the air, the blood ran quick in her veins.  The dirty big hall, with its high windows, was fairyland; the whispering crowd, Rodney’s nearness, and the consciousness of her own youth and beauty, her flushed cheeks and loosened bronze hair, acted upon Martie like strong wine.  She grew lovely beneath his very eyes; she was nineteen, and she loved!

They talked incessantly, elaborating the simple things they said with a by-play of eyes and hands, making the insignificant words rich with lowered tones, with smiles and the meeting of eyes.  He told Martie of his college days; borrowing episodes at random from the lives of other men, men whom he admired.  Martie believed it all, believed that he had written the Junior Farce, that he had been president of his class, that the various college societies had disputed for his membership.  In return, she spun her own romances, flinging a veil of attractive eccentricity over her father’s character, generously giving Lydia an anonymous admirer, and painting the dreary old mansion of North Main Street as a sort of enchanted prison with her pretty restless self as captive therein.  The two exchanged brief French phrases, each believing the other to have a fair command of the language, and Martie even quoted poetry, to which Rodney listened in intense silence, his eyes fixed upon hers.

Suddenly the house was darkened and the curtain rose.  The play was “The Sword of the King,” a drama that seemed to Martie well suited to her own exalted mood.  She thought the whole company wonderful, the leading lady especially gifted.  She learned with awe that Rodney had known Wallace Bannister, the leading man, more or less intimately for years.  An aunt of his lived in Pittsville and the two had