eager gayety, which but
little veiled both interrogation and entreaty--as if she asked: "Is it
too much for you? Can't you bear it? Won't you PLEASE bear it? I would
for you. Won't you give me a sign that it's all right?"

He looked at her but fleetingly, and seemed to suffer from the heat, in
spite of every manly effort not to wipe his brow too often. His colour,
after rising when he greeted Alice and her father, had departed, leaving
him again moistly pallid; a condition arising from discomfort, no doubt,
but, considered as a decoration, almost poetically becoming to him.
Not less becoming was the faint, kindly smile, which showed his wish to
express amusement and approval; and yet it was a smile rather strained
and plaintive, as if he, like Adams, could only do the best he could.

He pleased Adams, who thought him a fine young man, and decidedly
the quietest that Alice had ever shown to her family. In her father's
opinion this was no small merit; and it was to Russell's credit, too,
that he showed embarrassment upon this first intimate presentation; here
was an applicant with both reserve and modesty. "So far, he seems to be
first rate a mighty fine young man," Adams thought; and, prompted by no
wish to part from Alice but by reminiscences of apparent candidates less
pleasing, he added, "At last!"

Alice's liveliness never flagged. Her smoothing over of things was an
almost continuous performance, and had to be. Yet, while she chattered
through the hot and heavy courses, the questions she asked herself
were as continuous as the performance, and as poignant as what her eyes
seemed to be asking Russell. Why had she not prevailed over her mother's
fear of being "skimpy?" Had she been, indeed, as her mother said she
looked, "in a trance?" But above all: What was the matter with HIM? What
had happened? For she told herself with painful humour that something
even worse than this dinner must be "the matter with him."

The small room, suffocated with the odour of boiled sprouts, grew hotter
and hotter as more and more food appeared, slowly borne in, between
deathly long waits, by the resentful, loud-breathing Gertrude. And while
Alice still sought Russell's glance, and read the look upon his face
a dozen different ways, fearing all of them; and while the straggling
little flowers died upon the stained cloth, she felt her heart grow as
heavy as the food, and wondered that it did not die like the roses.

With the arrival o