ee her alone. There was always somebody near, and I
thought if I overstepped the mark she might be offended, or her father
might get on to it and have me fired for impertinence."

His listener suddenly abandoned his semi-recumbent position for one of
alert attention and ceased smoking, not yet fully aware of the reason
for his dawning excitement, except that the last words had called up a
vision of Bishop Wycliffe to his mind. He was in a state of suspended
perception, trembling upon the brink of a discovery he was loath to
make, waiting with painful tension for more light.

"So I did n't even meet her halfway," Emmet was saying. "She kept
asking me questions about my life, until little by little she knew all
about me. But the thing that interested her most was the fact that I
belonged to a union, and that I had read a good deal of political
economy. Well, at Christmas time I got a box of books without any clew
as to the sender, but of course I knew who sent them. They were Plato
and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and John Stuart Mill, and books of
that kind. After that she began to talk to me, right before her
friends or her father, of my studies. I read at the books, at first to
please her and to have something to say about them, and then because I
became interested. Her friends regarded me as one of her charities and
began to patronise me, but all the time I knew she felt differently,
though no one suspected it but ourselves.

"Just before I left the car to play ball in the spring, she said she
hoped it would be the last time, for I was fit for something better.
Several times she happened to be in Warwick that summer when we played
there, and I saw her in the grand stand; and once, when I knocked a
home run, I saw her wave her handkerchief to let me know she saw me do
it. When I came back in the fall, we began with a new understanding.
I had thought a good deal of her during the summer, and I knew she had
of me. There was more between us than before, and it was only a
question of time and opportunity before we should come together. We
happened to take the same car one evening when I was off duty. All the
way up we talked like two old friends, and when she reached her street,
I helped her off and then walked over with her to her house on Birdseye
Avenue."

A sharp crackling sound startled him into silence. Leigh had
unconsciously been clenching the amber stem of his pipe with increasing
intensity, and