hich
was suspiciously like weeping, and with the smother of kisses, which she
could not restrain nor he prevent, although each burned and seared his
very soul.

She backed into the room and pulled him after her by the lapels of his
coat; but, as the brighter light struck upon his face, she stopped with
widening eyes, through which he could read the troubled question in her
mind.

"Oh, my poor big brother. I didn't realize ... I mean, how you must have
suffered. Poor dear, you don't have to tell me how ill you have been, so
far away from all of us who love you."

Her pitying words drove the last nail in his crucified hopes. Not only
were they, all too obviously, merely those of a child who loved him with
a sister's love, but they told him how changed, wan and aged he was; one
who was, in fact, no longer fitted to mate with radiant youth.

"'Old, ain't I, and ugly?'" He imitated Dick Deadeye with a laughing
voice, but the laugh was not true.

"Old and ugly?" she repeated, in horror. "Donald, how _can_ you? You're
tired out, that is all; and as for this--" she lightly touched the sheen
of silvery gray at his temples, where the alchemy of Time and stress had
made its mark--"it makes you look so ... so distinguished that I am
ashamed of my frivolously familiar manner of greeting you. But I just
couldn't help it, and I promise not to embarrass you again. Yes, you
_were_ embarrassed. I could read it in your face."

There was but a moment for conversation with the others, and they were
whirled off to catch the train for the North Shore resort.

When they were seated, face to face, in the Pullman chair car, there
came a moment of silence, during which each studied the other covertly.
Donald decided that, physically, the girl had not greatly changed from
the picture of her which he had borne away in his heart. The passing
years had merely deepened the charm of the soft, waving hair, whose rich
and glinting chestnut strands swept low on her broad forehead and
nestled against the nape of her neck; the slender patrician nose and
wonderfully shadowed eyes; the smooth contour of cheek and rounded chin;
and the tender glory which still trembled, as in the old days, on her
sensitive lips. But, in her poise and speech, after the first rush of
impetuous childlike eagerness had spent itself, he discovered a new
maturity, and he realized that, where he had left a child, he found a
woman, whose heart was no longer worn upon her sleev