r dark hair in a long braid tied with a red ribbon, of her slender
legs clad in black stockings of shining silk. We felt the occasion to be
somehow too significant, too eloquent for words....

In silence we climbed the flight of stone steps that led up to the
Blackwood mansion, when suddenly the door was opened, letting out sounds
of music and revelry. Mr. Blackwood's coloured butler, Ned, beamed at us
hospitably, inviting us to enter the brightness within. The shades were
drawn, the carpets were covered with festal canvas, the folding doors
between the square rooms were flung back, the prisms of the big
chandeliers flung their light over animated groups of matrons and
children. Mrs. Watling, the mother of the Watling twins--too young to be
present was directing with vivacity the game of "King William was King
James's son," and Mrs. McAlery was playing the piano.

"Now choose you East, now choose you West,
Now choose the one you love the best!"

Tom Peters, in a velvet suit and consequently very miserable, refused to
embrace Ethel Hollister; while the scornful Julia lurked in a corner:
nothing would induce her to enter such a foolish game. I experienced a
novel discomfiture when Ralph kissed Nancy.... Afterwards came the feast,
from which Ham Durrett, in a pink paper cap with streamers, was at length
forcibly removed by his mother. Thus early did he betray his love for the
flesh pots....

It was not until I was sixteen that a player came and touched the keys of
my soul, and it awoke, bewildered, at these first tender notes. The music
quickened, tripping in ecstasy, to change by subtle phrases into themes
of exquisite suffering hitherto unexperienced. I knew that I loved Nancy.

With the advent of longer dresses that reached to her shoe tops a change
had come over her. The tomboy, the willing camp-follower who loved me and
was unashamed, were gone forever, and a mysterious, transfigured being,
neither girl nor woman, had magically been evolved. Could it be possible
that she loved me still? My complacency had vanished; suddenly I had
become the aggressor, if only I had known how to "aggress"; but in her
presence I was seized by an accursed shyness that paralyzed my tongue,
and the things I had planned to say were left unuttered. It was
something--though I did not realize it--to be able to feel like that.

The time came when I could no longer keep this thing to myself. The need
of an outlet, of a confid