ottle of wine?"

"Yes," he cried, his heart beating at a great rate. "Do you mean--"

"To drink to our engagement," she interrupted bravely. "May it be a
short one!"

"No!" he almost shouted, bringing his fist fiercely down upon the
table. "May it last forever!"

"What?"

"I mean--oh, I see what you mean. You're right. May it be a short
one." He laughed and added, "My error."

After the wine arrived they discussed the matter thoroughly.

"We'll have to take a small apartment at first," he said, "and I
believe, yes, by golly, I know there's a small one in the house where
I live, a big room and a sort of a dressing-room-kitchenette and the
use of a bath on the same floor."

She clapped her hands happily, and he thought how pretty she was
really, that is, the upper part of her face--from the bridge of the
nose down she was somewhat out of true. She continued enthusiastically:

"And as soon as we can afford it we'll take a real swell apartment,
with an elevator and a telephone girl."

"And after that a place in the country--and a car."

"I can't imagine nothing more fun. Can you?"

Merlin fell silent a moment. He was thinking that he would have to
give up his room, the fourth floor rear. Yet it mattered very little
now. During the past year and a half--in fact, from the very date of
Caroline's visit to the Moonlight Quill--he had never seen her. For a
week after that visit her lights had failed to go on--darkness brooded
out into the areaway, seemed to grope blindly in at his expectant,
uncurtained window. Then the lights had appeared at last, and instead
of Caroline and her callers they stowed a stodgy family--a little man
with a bristly mustache and a full-bosomed woman who spent her
evenings patting her hips and rearranging bric-a-brac. After two days
of them Merlin had callously pulled down his shade.

No, Merlin could think of nothing more fun than rising in the world
with Olive. There would be a cottage in a suburb, a cottage painted
blue, just one class below the sort of cottages that are of white
stucco with a green roof. In the grass around the cottage would be
rusty trowels and a broken green bench and a baby-carriage with a
wicker body that sagged to the left. And around the grass and the
baby-carriage and the cottage itself, around his whole world there
would be the arms of Olive, a little stouter, the arms of her
neo-Olivian period, when, as she walked, her cheeks would tremble up
and down ever