s he glanced down and met Eleanor's eyes brimming with all those recent
tendernesses, his carefully practised stoicism received a frightful jolt.

As the "All aboard!" sounded, she clutched his sleeve in sudden panic.

"Oh, Quin, I know I'm going to be horribly lonesome and homesick. I--I
wish you were going too!"

"All right! I'll go! Why not?"

"But you can't! I was fooling. You must get off this instant!"

"May I come on later? Say in the spring?"

"Yes, yes! But get off now! Quick, we are moving!"

She had almost to push him down the aisle and off the steps. Then, as the
train gained speed, instead of looking forward to the wide fields of
freedom stretching before her, she looked wistfully back to the
disconsolate figure on the platform, and, with a sigh that was half for
him and half for herself, she lifted her fingers to her lips and rashly
blew him a good-by kiss.

CHAPTER 28

That aerial kiss proved more intoxicating to Quin than all the more
tangible ones he had ever received. It sent him swaggering through the
next few months with his head in the air and his heart on fire. Nothing
could stop him now, he told himself boastfully. Old Bangs was showing him
signal favor, Madam Bartlett was his staunch friend, Mr. Ranny and the
aunties were his allies, and even if Miss Nell didn't care for him yet,
she didn't care for anybody else, and when a girl like Miss Nell looks at
a fellow the way she had looked at him----

At this rapturous point he invariably abandoned cold prose for poetry and
burst into song.

Almost every week brought him a letter from Eleanor--not the romantic,
carefully penned epistles she had indited to Harold Phipps, but hasty
scrawls often dashed off with a pencil. In them she described her absurd
attempts at housekeeping in the little two-room apartment; her absorbing
experiences in the dramatic school; all the ups and downs of her
wonderful new life. She was evidently enjoying her freedom, but Quin
flattered himself that between the lines he could find evidences of
discouragement, of homesickness, and of the coming disillusionment on
which he was counting to bring her home when her six months of study were
over.

It was only when Rose read him Papa Claude's lengthy effusions that his
heart misgave him. Papa Claude announced that Eleanor was sweeping
everything before her at the dramatic school, where her beauty and talent
were causing much comme