ow just emerging from the door.

His first hope was that he had crippled a lodger. He hated the sight
and sound of them. He had always felt their presence in the house an
unpardonable intrusion. A second look showed him that the youngster who
had hurried down the steps with profound apologies and much
embarrassment was not a lodger. He was dressed too handsomely and he
had evidently been calling on some one.

Perhaps on Harriet!

A sudden fear gripped his heart. He felt like following him to the
corner and demanding his reasons for such impudence.

Where had he seen that boy's face?

Somewhere, beyond a doubt. But he couldn't place him.

He let himself in softly and started at the sight of Harriet's smiling
face framed in the parlor doorway. His worst fears were confirmed. She
was dressed in a dainty evening gown and had evidently enjoyed her
visitor.

Stuart pretended not to notice the fact and asked her to play.

He fell lazily into an arm chair while the deft fingers swept the keys.
As he sat dreaming and watching the rhythmic movement of her delicate
hands, he began to realize at last that his little pal, stub-nosed, red
haired and freckled, had silently and mysteriously grown into a
charming woman. He wondered what had become of the stub-nose? It seemed
to have stretched out into perfect proportions. The freckles had faded
into a delicate white skin of creamy velvet. And what once threatened
to be a violent red head had softened into beaten gold.

But the most charming feature of all was the deep spiritual tenderness
of her eyes, blue sometimes, gray and blue sometimes, but always with
little brown spots in them which Nature seemed to have dropped by
accident the day she painted them. Stuart always imagined she had
picked up a brown brush by mistake. He thought with a sudden pang of
the possibility of losing her. She was twenty-three now, in the pride
and glory of perfect young womanhood, and yet she had no lovers. He
wondered why? Her music of course. It had been the one absorbing
passion of life. Her progress had been slow for the first years, while
at college. But during the past two years of training every lesson
seemed to tell. He had watched her development with pride and brooding
tenderness. And her eyes had always sparkled with deep joy at his
slightest word of praise. For the first time it had occurred to him as
an immediate possibility that she might marry and their lives drift
apart.

He res