—repaying him with innocent full eyes that enjoyed the confusion they created.
"Oh, I'm—I'm all right," he stammered, but raised the collar obediently with an expression of face at once so pleased and so blushingly grateful that it appealed to her affection like the clumsy devotion of the awkward age.
She continued their conversation in a more serious tone for the remainder of the way, drawing from him the confession that he did not intend to study law, but did not know what he did intend to study; and when they stopped at the street corner below her house again, she gave him her hand with demure good wishes for his success in whatever "course" he decided to follow; and he carried away with him a memory of her gentle confidence that was at once a benediction and a surety for hope.
He took a long walk, that afternoon, to the elm where he had fancied her sitting with him looking down on the town; and he stood there in the snow, leaning against the tree, his eyes fixed on the distant spire of St. Stephen's that marked the quarter in which she lived. After supper, he locked himself in his room, and having lit his lamp and opened his books, he spent the evening in idleness, trying to draw a picture of her in lead pencil on a page of his note-book, tantalized by the visual memory of her which he could not reproduce—or abandoning himself to it, with closed eyes, resting his head and arms on the table, smiling blindly—until the cold drove him to bed. There, he lay on his back, his hands
