VII
The months that followed are no more to be described than the love-fancies of a girl. The boy worked over his books with a mind that was in a mist, and as soon as he was free of school he went to his make-believe meetings like an opium-eater to his dreams. Of what he did there, of what he thought there, he wrote her not a word. He filled his letters with news of the acquaintances whom she had left in Coulton—particularly of Conroy, for whom she inquired. Her own letters were made up of apologies for not being able to write more frequently and of accounts of her boating and bathing and picnicking about the lake. It was a boy and girl correspondence, more idle than chatter. He told her that Dexter was "not very well"; that the stream in the ravine had almost dried out to a trickle because a farmer had dammed it up to make a pool for his cows; that the church had been struck by lightning; that he was writing on his "exams." She sent him blue-print pictures of herself in a group of cottages on the beach. He pasted them in an old "Composition Book " with her letters.
When his examinations were finished and his school closed, he began to make plans. He would go up to the University for four years. Then he would take his course in the law school and accept
