How agreeable--flatteringly so, in
fact--she had been all day! There was nothing like travelling together
to make people intimate. It was clear that she understood his intentions
very well: indeed, how could she help it? He had always said that a
fellow had shown himself a bungler at lovemaking if he were not
practically assured of the result before he came to the point of the
declaration. The sensation of leaving everything else so rapidly behind
that people have when sitting on the rear platform of a train of cars
makes them feel, by force of contrast, nearer to each other and more
identified. How pretty she looked sitting there in the doorway, her eyes
bent so pensively on the track behind as the car-wheels so swiftly
reeled it off! He had tucked her in comfortably. No cold could get to
the sweet little girl, and none ever should so long as he lived to make
her comfort his care.

One small gloved hand lay on her lap outside the shawl. What a jolly
little hand it was! He reached out his own and took it, but, without
even a moment's hesitation for him to extract a flattering inference
from, she withdrew it. Perhaps something in his matter-of-course way
displeased her.

To know when it is best to submit to a partial rebuff, rather than make
a bad matter worse by trying to save one's pride, is a rare wisdom.
Still, Lombard might have exercised it at another time. But there are
days when the magnetisms are all wrong, and a person not ordinarily
deficient in tact, having begun wrong, goes on blundering like a
schoolboy. Piqued at the sudden shock to the pleasant day-dream, in
which he had fancied himself already virtually assured of this young
lady--a day-dream which she was not really accountable for spoiling,
since she had not been privy to it--what should he do but find
expression for his mingled vexation and wounded affection by reminding
her of a previous occasion on which she had allowed him the liberty she
now denied? Doubtless helping to account for this lack of tact was the
idea that he should thus justify himself for so far presuming just now.
Not, of course, that there is really any excuse for a young man's
forgetting that ladies have one advantage over Omniscience, in that not
only are they privileged to remember what they please, but also to
ignore what they see fit to forget.

"You have forgotten that evening at the California Theatre," was what
this devoted youth said.

"I'm sure I don't know to what yo