at made a tumult of her days and nights?
Yet something told her that it was; something repeated insistently,
"Always I will wait."... He would keep faith, that grave, big man!

But every day, as she moved with tightened lips to the table where
the mail lay spread, coloring at a foreign stamp, paling with the
disappointment, her hope grew fainter. He dared not write and tell her.
It was over. Violet shadows darkened her eyes; a feverish flush made
her, as it grew and faded at the slightest warning, more girlish than
ever.

But the young life about her seemed only to mock her own late weakened
impulse. It was not the same. She was playing heavy stakes: they hardly
realized the game. All but one, they irritated her. This one, since
her first short call, had come and come again. No explanations, no
confidences, had passed between them; their sympathy, deep-rooted,
expressed itself perfectly in the ordinary conventional tone of two
reserved if congenial natures. The girl did not discuss herself, the
woman dared not. They talked of books, music, travel; never, as if by
tacit agreement, of any of the countless possible personalities in a
place so given to personal discussion.

She could not have told how she knew that the girl had come to college
to please a mother whose great regret was to have missed such training,
nor did she remember when her incurious friend had learned her tense
determination of flight; she could have sworn that she had never spoken
of it. Sometimes, so perfectly did they appear to understand each other
beneath an indifferent conversation, it seemed to her that the words
must be the merest symbols, and that the girl who always caught her
lightest shade of meaning knew to exactness her alternate hope and fear,
the rudderless tossing toward and from her taunting harbor-light.

They sat by an open window, breathing in the moist air from the fresh,
upturned earth. The gardeners were working over the sprouting beds; the
sun came in warm and sweet.

"Three weeks ago it was almost cold at this time," said the girl. "In
the springtime I give up going home, and love the place. But two years
more--two years!"

"Do you really mind it so much?"

"I think what I mind the most is that I don't like it more," said the
girl slowly. "Mamma wanted it so. She really loved study. I don't, but
if I did--I should love it more than this. This would seem so childish.
And if I just wanted a good time, why, then this would