evening and holding her tight pressed his
lips to her cheek.

She struggled to her feet. "You musn't," she said. "It isn't right. I
can't let you do that."

"But I love you," he exclaimed, pursuing her. "I want to marry you. Will
you have me, Angela? Will you be mine?"

She looked at him yearningly, for she realized that she had made him do
things her way--this wild, unpractical, artistic soul. She wanted to
yield then and there but something told her to wait.

"I won't tell you now," she said, "I want to talk to papa and mamma. I
haven't told them anything as yet. I want to ask them about you, and
then I'll tell you when I come again."

"Oh, Angela," he pleaded.

"Now, please wait, Mr. Witla," she pleaded. She had never yet called him
Eugene. "I'll come again in two or three weeks. I want to think it over.
It's better."

He curbed his desire and waited, but it made all the more vigorous and
binding the illusion that she was the one woman in the world for him.
She aroused more than any woman yet a sense of the necessity of
concealing the eagerness of his senses--of pretending something higher.
He even tried to deceive himself into the belief that this was a
spiritual relationship, but underneath all was a burning sense of her
beauty, her physical charm, her passion. She was sleeping as yet, bound
in convention and a semi-religious interpretation of life. If she were
aroused! He closed his eyes and dreamed.

CHAPTER XIII

In two weeks Angela came back, ready to plight her faith; and Eugene was
waiting, eager to receive it. He had planned to meet her under the smoky
train shed of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul depot, to escort her
to Kinsley's for dinner, to bring her some flowers, to give her a ring
he had secured in anticipation, a ring which had cost him seventy-five
dollars and consumed quite all his savings; but she was too regardful of
the drama of the situation to meet him anywhere but in the parlor of her
aunt's house, where she could look as she wished. She wrote that she
must come down early and when he arrived at eight of a Saturday evening
she was dressed in the dress that seemed most romantic to her, the one
she had worn when she first met him at Alexandria. She half suspected
that he would bring flowers and so wore none, and when he came with pink
roses, she added those to her corsage. She was a picture of rosy youth
and trimness and not unlike the character by whose name he had
chr