, yes, of
course," she said, and tried to smile. "Of course we had to do it--I do
think it'll be nice. Of course I'm looking forward to it."

CHAPTER XX

She was indeed "looking forward" to that evening, but in a cloud of
apprehension; and, although she could never have guessed it, this was
the simultaneous condition of another person--none other than the guest
for whose pleasure so much cooking and scrubbing seemed to be necessary.
Moreover, Mr. Arthur Russell's premonitions were no product of mere
coincidence; neither had any magical sympathy produced them. His state
of mind was rather the result of rougher undercurrents which had all the
time been running beneath the surface of a romantic friendship.

Never shrewder than when she analyzed the gentlemen, Alice did not
libel him when she said he was one of those quiet men who are a bit
flirtatious, by which she meant that he was a bit "susceptible," the
same thing--and he had proved himself susceptible to Alice upon his
first sight of her. "There!" he said to himself. "Who's that?" And in
the crowd of girls at his cousin's dance, all strangers to him, she was
the one he wanted to know.

Since then, his summer evenings with her had been as secluded as if, for
three hours after the falling of dusk, they two had drawn apart from
the world to some dear bower of their own. The little veranda was that
glamorous nook, with a faint golden light falling through the glass of
the closed door upon Alice, and darkness elsewhere, except for the one
round globe of the street lamp at the corner. The people who passed
along the sidewalk, now and then, were only shadows with voices, moving
vaguely under the maple trees that loomed in obscure contours against
the stars. So, as the two sat together, the back of the world was the
wall and closed door behind them; and Russell, when he was away from
Alice, always thought of her as sitting there before the closed door. A
glamour was about her thus, and a spell upon him; but he had a formless
anxiety never put into words: all the pictures of her in his mind
stopped at the closed door.

He had another anxiety; and, for the greater part, this was of her own
creating. She had too often asked him (no matter how gaily) what he
heard about her, too often begged him not to hear anything. Then, hoping
to forestall whatever he might hear, she had been at too great pains to
account for it, to discredit and mock it; and, though he laughed at her