s Dick, and that's Bob, and the one just beyond is Jack."

"Where is Harry?" asked Thorpe.

"I thought one in a woods was quite sufficient," she replied with the
least little air of impertinence.

"Why do you name them such common, everyday names?" he inquired.

"I'll tell you. It's because they are so big and grand themselves,
that it did not seem to me they needed high-sounding names. What do you
think?" she begged with an appearance of the utmost anxiety.

Thorpe expressed himself as in agreement. As the half-quizzical
conversation progressed, he found their relations adjusting themselves
with increasing rapidity. He had been successively the mystic devotee
before his vision, the worshipper before his goddess; now he was
unconsciously assuming the attitude of the lover before his mistress.
It needs always this humanizing touch to render the greatest of all
passions livable.

And as the human element developed, he proved at the same time greater
and greater difficulty in repressing himself and greater and greater
fear of the results in case he should not do so. He trembled with the
desire to touch her long slender hand, and as soon as his imagination
had permitted him that much he had already crushed her to him and had
kissed passionately her starry face. Words hovered on his lips
longing for flight. He withheld them by an effort that left him almost
incoherent, for he feared with a deadly fear lest he lose forever what
the vision had seemed to offer to his hand.

So he said little, and that lamely, for he dreaded to say too much. To
her playful sallies he had no riposte. And in consequence he fell more
silent with another boding--that he was losing his cause outright for
lack of a ready word.

He need not have been alarmed. A woman in such a case hits as surely as
a man misses. Her very daintiness and preciosity of speech indicated it.
For where a man becomes stupid and silent, a woman covers her emotions
with words and a clever speech. Not in vain is a proud-spirited girl
stared down in such a contest of looks; brave deeds simply told by
a friend are potent to win interest in advance; a straight, muscular
figure, a brown skin, a clear, direct eye, a carriage of power and
acknowledged authority, strike hard at a young imagination; a mighty
passion sweeps aside the barriers of the heart. Such a victory, such a
friend, such a passion had Thorpe.

And so the last spoken exchange between them meant nothing; but