e had been something of
an invalid; she had a sweet, sad face, and delicate hands so thin as to
seem almost transparent; and she always sat in a chair under the great
tree on the lawn, smiling at us as we soared to dizzy heights in the
swing, or played croquet, or scurried through the paths, and in and out
of the latticed summer-house with shrieks of laughter and terror. It all
ended with a feast at a long table made of sawhorses and boards covered
with a white cloth, and when the cake was cut there was wild excitement
as to who would get the ring and who the thimble.

We were more decorous, or rather more awkward now, and the party began
with a formal period when the boys gathered in a group and pretended
indifference to the girls. The girls were cleverer at it, and actually
achieved the impression that they were indifferent. We kept an eye on
them, uneasily, while we talked. To be in Nancy's presence and not alone
with Nancy was agonizing, and I wondered at a sang-froid beyond my power
to achieve, accused her of coldness, my sufferings being the greater
because she seemed more beautiful, daintier, more irreproachable than
I had ever seen her. Even at that early age she gave evidence of the
social gift, and it was due to her efforts that we forgot our best
clothes and our newly born self-consciousness. When I begged her to slip
away with me among the currant bushes she whispered:--"I can't, Hugh.
I'm the hostess, you know."

I had gone there in a flutter of anticipation, but nothing went right
that day. There was dancing in the big rooms that looked out on the
garden; the only girl with whom I cared to dance was Nancy, and she was
busy finding partners for the backward members of both sexes; though she
was my partner, to be sure, when it all wound up with a Virginia reel on
the lawn. Then, at supper, to cap the climax of untoward incidents, an
animated discussion was begun as to the relative merits of the various
colleges, the girls, too, taking sides. Mac Willett, Nancy's cousin, was
going to Yale, Gene Hollister to Princeton, the Ewan boys to our State
University, while Perry Blackwood and Ralph Hambleton and Ham Durrett
were destined for Harvard; Tom Peters, also, though he was not to
graduate from the Academy for another year. I might have known that
Ralph would have suspected my misery. He sat triumphantly next to Nancy
herself, while I had been told off to entertain the faithful Sophy.
Noticing my silence, he de