boyish dreams. Our dreams are circumscribed by our
experience, and in those days it had been inconceivable to me that she
should grow more lovely than Miss Mincer, the butcher's daughter, and I
had pictured myself walking proudly through the streets of Malcolmville
at the side of a tall, slender girl, her head crowned by a glazed black
hat, her body incased in a tight-fitting jersey. This Penelope Blight
in the carved chair where generations of her grandmothers had made tea
before her, by the stately fireplace at which her forebears had warmed
their hands and hearts, could have no kin with the barefooted girl who
had stood with me at the edge of the clearing and, pointing over the
weeds to the forlorn cabin, called it home.

Was it a wonder that my tone was formal; that, overcome by a sense of
estrangement, I talked of the weather as I sipped my tea; that I asked
her if she had enjoyed last night's dance, speaking as though dancing
were my own favorite amusement; that when I pronounced her name it was
in a halting, embarrassed undertone? Even speaking, it thus seemed
gross presumption. How unlikely, then, that I should refer to by-gone
days in her presence when it was incredible that there had ever been
days like those! In all probability she would draw herself up and
reply that I must be thinking of some other Penelope Blight, that to
her I was nothing more than a formal creature whom she had met
somewhere, where she could not remember, a man like hundreds of others
whom she knew, lay figures for the tailor's art, who spoke only a
language limited to the last dance and the one to come. Believing
this, I finished my tea, and, putting down my cup, I abandoned my one
resource when conversation lagged. Why had I come at all?

I had come to sit with Penelope, just as we were sitting now, in the
shadows, in the firelight. At home we had often sat together on the
back steps, in the shadows of the valley, in the firelight of the
clouds glowing in the last sun flames. Now we should be, as then, good
comrades, and freely as I had talked to her then as from our humble
perch we watched the departing day, so freely could I talk to her now
in the statelier environment. In that short walk uptown I had left a
thousand things unsaid. But one special thing I had left unsaid, one
vital fact in my life unrevealed, that was of paramount importance. In
the excitement of our first meeting my silence had been discretion, but
disc