a low, cooing, coaxing murmur. He realized now how intensely he must
have listened for it in the night, how every tone of it must have
pervaded him and possessed him. He was in love with it, he was as
entirely fascinated by it as if it were the girl's whole presence, her
looks, her qualities. The remnant of the summer passed in the fret of
business, which was doubly irksome through his feeling of injury in
being kept from the girl whose personality he constructed from the sound
of her voice, and set over his fancy in an absolute sovereignty. The
image he had created of her remained a dim and blurred vision throughout
the day, but by night it became distinct and compelling. One evening,
late in the fall, he could endure the stress no longer, and he yielded
to the temptation which had beset him from the first moment he renounced
his purpose of returning in person the circular addressed to her as a
means of her acquaintance. He wrote to her, and in terms as dignified as
he could contrive, and as free from any ulterior import, he told her he
had found it in the hotel hallway and had meant to send it to her at
once, thinking it might be of some slight use to her. He had failed to
do this, and now, having come upon it among some other papers, he sent
it with an explanation which he hoped she would excuse him for troubling
her with.

This was not true, but he did not see how he could begin with her by
saying that he had found the circular in her room, and had kept it by
him ever since, looking at it every day, and leaving it where he could
see it the last thing before he slept at night and the first thing after
he woke in the morning. As to her reception of his story, he had to
trust to his knowledge that she was, like himself, of country birth and
breeding, and to his belief that she would not take alarm at his
overture. He did not go much into the world and was little acquainted
with its usages, yet he knew enough to suspect that a woman of the world
would either ignore his letter, or would return a cold and snubbing
expression of Miss Simpson's thanks for Mr. Stephen M. Langbourne's
kindness.

He had not only signed his name and given his address carefully in hopes
of a reply, but he had enclosed the business card of his firm as a token
of his responsibility. The partner in a wholesale stationery house ought
to be an impressive figure in the imagination of a village girl; but it
was some weeks before any answer came to La