express trains better. They--they don't keep you so long on the
way."

"Oh, I hate trains," said she cheerfully.

Three weeks ... Ruefully he surveyed the desolation. "I ought to be
gone by then," he muttered.

A trifle startled, the girl looked up at him. As he was not looking
at her, but staring moodily into what was then black vacancy, her
look lingered and deepened. She saw a most bronzed and hardy looking
young man, tall and broad-shouldered, with gray eyes, wide apart
under straight black brows, and black hair brushed straight back
from a wide forehead. She saw a rugged nose, a likeable mouth, and
an abrupt and aggressive chin, saved somehow from grimness by a deep
cleft in the blunt end of it.... She thought he was a very
_stirring_ looking young man. Undoubtedly he was a very sudden
young man--if he meant one bit of what he intimated.

Feminine-wise, she mocked.

"What a calamity!"

"Yes, for me," said Billy squarely. "You know it's--it's awfully
jolly to meet a girl from home out here!"

"A girl from _home_----!"

"Well, all America seems home from this place. And I shouldn't be
surprised if we knew a lot of the same people ... You can get a good
line on me that way, you know," he laughed. "Now I went to Williams
and then to Boston Tech., and there must be acquaintances----"

"Don't!" said Arlee, with a laughing gesture of prohibition. "We
probably have thousands of the same acquaintances, and you would
turn out to be some one I knew everything about--perhaps the first
fiance of my roommate whose letters I used to help her answer."

"Where did you go to school?"

"At Elm Court School, near New York. For just a year."

He shook his head with an air of relief. "Never was engaged to
anybody's roommate there.... But if you'd rather not have my
background painted----"

"_Much_ rather not," said the girl gaily. "Why, half the romance, I
mean the fun, of meeting people abroad is _not_ knowing anything
about them beforehand."

The music was beginning again. Unwillingly the remembrance of the
outer world beat back into Billy's mind. Unhappily he became aware
that the room appeared blackened with young men in evening clothes,
staring ominously his way.

Squarely he stood in front of the girl. "I think this is the encore
to our dance," he told her with a little smile.

She shook her pretty head laughingly at him--and then yielded to his
clasping hands. "But we must dance back to the Evershams," she