seemed to be darting unfriendly fingers
plucking at her secret. Leaning from her nest of cushions she thrust the
poker into the glowing resinous mass till sparks whizzed up the
chimney's black maw in a torrent.

"How they fly!" she said. "Rickey Snyder calls it raising a blizzard in
Hades. I used to think they flew up to the sky and became the littlest
stars. What a pity we have to grow up and learn so much! I'd rather have
kept on believing that when the red leaves in the woods whirled about in
a circle the fairies were dancing, and that it was the gnomes who put
the cockle-burs in the hounds' ears."

She had been talking at random, gradually becoming shrinkingly conscious
of his constrained and stumbling manner. She had, however, but half
defined his errand when he came to it all in a burst.

"I--I can't get to it, somehow, Shirley," he said with sudden
desperation, "but here it is. I've come to ask you to marry me. Don't
stop me," he went on hurriedly, lifting his hand; "whatever you say, I
must tell you. I've been trying to for months and months!" Now that he
had started, it came with a boyish vehemence that both chilled and
thrilled her. Even in her own desolation, and shrinking almost
unbearably from the avowal, the hope and brightness in his voice touched
her with pity. It seemed to her that life was a strange jumble of
unescapable and incomprehensible pain. And all the while, in the young
voice vibrant with feeling, her cringing ear was catching imagined
echoes of that other voice, graver and more self-contained, but shaken
by the same passion, in that iteration of "I love you! I love you!"

His answer came to him finally in her silence, and he released her hands
which he had caught in his own. They dropped, limp and unresponsive, in
her lap. "Shirley," he said brokenly, "maybe you can't care for me--yet.
But if you will marry me, I--I'll be content with so little, till--you
do."

She shook her head, her hair making dim flashes in the firelight. "No,
Chilly," she said. "It makes me wretched to give you pain, but I must--I
must! Love isn't like that. It doesn't come afterward. I know. I could
never give you what you want. You would end by despising me, as
I--should despise myself."

"I won't give up," he said incoherently. "I can't give up. Not so long
as I know there's nobody else. At the ball I thought--I thought perhaps
you cared for Valiant--but since he told me--"

He stopped suddenly, for she was l