der his wing--persuaded me to take
the highway, and not care a hang for anything."

"How delightful!" she replied, but so slowly that he began to fear that
his confidences had alarmed her. "That's too good to be true; you're
fooling, aren't you--really?"

His eyes had grown accustomed to the light, and her profile was now
faintly limned in the dusk. Hers was the slender face of youth. The
silhouette revealed the straightest of noses and the firmest of little
chins. She was young, so young that he felt himself struggling in an
immeasurable gulf of years as he watched her. Apparently such
sophistication as she possessed was in the things of the world of wonder,
the happy land of make-believe.

"Keats would have liked a night like this," she said gently.

Deering was silent. Keats was a person whom he knew only as the subject
of a tiresome lecture in his English course at college.

"Bill Blake would have adored it, but he would have had lambs in the
pasture," she added.

"Bill Blake?" he questioned. "Do you mean Billy Blake who was half-back
on the Harvard eleven last year?"

She tossed her head and laughed merrily.

"I love that!" she replied lingeringly, as though to prolong her joy in
his ignorance. "I was thinking of a poet of that name who wrote a nice
verse something like this:

'I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem's wall.'"

No girl had ever quoted poetry to him before, and he was thinking more of
her pretty way of repeating the stanza--keeping time with her hands--than
of the verse itself.

"Well," he said, "what's the rest of it?"

"Oh, there isn't any rest of it! Don't you see that there couldn't be
anything more--that it's finished--a perfect little poem all by itself!"

He played with a loosened bit of stone, meekly conscious of his
stupidity. And he did not like to appear stupid before a girl who danced
alone in the starlight and hung moons in trees.

"I'm afraid I don't get it. I'd a lot rather stay by this wall talking to
you than go to Jerusalem."

"You'd be foolish to do that if you really had the end of the golden
string, and could follow it to Paradise. I think it means any nice
place--just any place where happiness is."

He was not getting on, and to gain time he bade her repeat the stanza.

"I think I understand now; I've never g