, Ramsey?"

"Well--g'night."

She glanced up at the dark front of the house. "I guess the family's
gone to bed," she said, absently.

"I s'pose so."

"Well, good-night, Ramsey." She said this but still did not release his
arm, and suddenly, in a fluster, he felt that the time he dreaded had
come. Somehow, without knowing where, except that it was somewhere upon
what seemed to be a blurred face too full of obstructing features, he
kissed her.

She turned instantly away in the darkness, her hands over her cheeks;
and in a panic Ramsey wondered if he hadn't made a dreadful mistake.

"S'cuse me!" he said, stumbling toward the gate. "Well, I guess I got to
be gettin' along back home."

Chapter IX

He woke in the morning to a great self-loathing: he had kissed a girl.
Mingled with the loathing was a curious pride in the very fact that
caused the loathing, but the pride did not last long. He came downstairs
morbid to breakfast, and continued this mood afterward. At noon Albert
Paxton brought him a note which Milla had asked Sadie to ask Albert to
give him.

Dearie: I am just wondering if you thought as much about something so
sweet that happened last night as I did you know what. I think it was
the sweetest thing. I send you one with this note and I hope you will
think it is a sweet one. I would give you a real one if you were here
now and I hope you would think it was sweeter still than the one I put
in this note. It is the sweetest thing now you are mine and I am yours
forever kiddo. If you come around about friday eve it will be all right.
aunt Jess will be gone back home by then so come early and we will get
Sade and Alb and go to the band Concert. Don't forget what I said about
my putting something sweet in this note, and I hope you will think it is
a sweet one but not as sweet as the _real_ sweet one I would like to--

At this point Ramsey impulsively tore the note into small pieces. He
turned cold as his imagination projected a sketch of his mother in
the act of reading this missive, and of her expression as she read the
sentence: "It is the sweetest thing now you are mine and I am yours
forever kiddo." He wished that Milla hadn't written "kiddo." She called
him that, sometimes, but in her warm little voice the word seemed not at
all what it did in ink. He wished, too, that she hadn't said she was his
forever.

Suddenly he was seized with a horror of her.

Moisture broke out heavily upon him; he