there untouched, in spite of a great
hunger for it.

Having looked down, he now found difficulty in looking up, but gazed
steadily at his plate, and into this limited circle of vision came
Milla's delicate and rosy fingers, bearing a gift. "There," she said in
a motherly little voice. "It's a tomato mayonnaise sandwich and I made
it myself. I want you to eat it, Ramsey."

His own fingers approached tremulousness as he accepted the thick
sandwich from her and conveyed it to his mouth. A moment later his soul
filled with horror, for a spurt of mayonnaise dressing had caused a
catastrophe the scene of which occupied no inconsiderable area of his
right cheek; which was the cheek toward Milla. He groped wretchedly for
his handkerchief but could not find it; he had lost it. Sudden death
would have been relief; he was sure that after such grotesquerie Milla
could never bear to have anything more to do with him; he was ruined.

In his anguish he felt a paper napkin pressed gently into his hand; a
soft voice said in his ear, "Wipe it off with this, Ramsey. Nobody's
noticing."

So this incredibly charitable creature was still able to be his friend,
even after seeing him mayonnaised! Humbly marvelling, he did as she told
him, but avoided all further risks. He ate nothing more.

He sighed his first sigh of inexpressibleness, had a chill or so along
the spine, and at intervals his brow was bedewed.

Within his averted eyes there dwelt not the Milla Rust who sat beside
him, but an iridescent, fragile creature who had become angelic.

He spent the rest of the day dawdling helplessly about her; wherever she
went he was near, as near as possible, but of no deliberate volition of
his own. Something seemed to tie him to her, and Milla was nothing loth.
He seldom looked at her directly, or for longer than an instant, and
more rarely still did he speak to her except as a reply. What few
remarks he ventured upon his own initiative nearly all concerned the
landscape, which he commended repeatedly in a weak voice, as "kind of
pretty," though once he said he guessed there might be bugs in the bark
of a log on which they sat; and he became so immoderately personal as to
declare that if the bugs had to get on anybody he'd rather they got on
him than on Milla. She said that was "just perfectly lovely" of him,
asked where he got his sweet nature, and in other ways encouraged him to
continue the revelation, but Ramsey was unable to get forwa