his own ears and eyes.

"Not all my friends," his slow voice drawled at last, but even the
words were tinged with doubt. "Not all my friends," he said.

And again he was conscious first of her slimness, her smallness. He
was aware of the insistent, impish suggestion of boyishness in tilted
head and poised body, before the rays that wavered over his shoulder
from the windows behind him disclosed the misty gladness of welcome in
her eyes, splashed now with points of light not so very unlike the
blurred star-points in the infinitely deep, purplish pool of the sky
above them. Silently the man reached out and found the hand which had
lain for a moment upon his arm.

"So you are--you," he murmured, when his fingers touched hers. "I
wasn't--just sure."

The girl bobbed her head--her quaint and childishly impetuous
affirmative. She looked down at the hand holding her own,
contemplating her small white fingers curled up now into a warm, round
fist, and wondering at the completeness with which it was swallowed by
his big palm.

Suddenly unable to think quite clearly, she wondered at the new pulse
in her throat, which beat and beat until it seemed not easy even to
speak.

"Then it--must be you, too," she faltered. "I wasn't sure, either,
even when I knew it must be. I'd begun to believe that you hadn't
forgotten--that you didn't care to. . . . Will you please say that you
forgive me--please--for something over which I have been sorrier than
you can know?"

It was not more than a wisp of sound--that request. The words were
stumbling, and very earnest, and not very hard to understand. Silence
came again, broken only by the treble strains of violins beyond. Once,
in that quiet, his eyes strayed to the small and round, and yellow
object which she carried in the crook of one arm--a tiny papier-mache
pumpkin strapped to two fuzzy mice in patent leather harness--but the
pumpkin coach and tiny animals were not necessary to translate her
costume to him.

His eyes came back and clung to the velvety face of that slim
Cinderella in bits of transparent slippers and shimmering, star-edged
white, until even in spite of the gloom the girl recognized the change
which had come creeping over his face. She saw it surge up in his
eyes--the old undisguised wonder of the boy of ten years before, for
which, until that instant, she had looked in vain--but it was a man's
wonder of woman now, utter and absolute and all-enveloping. S