Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/103

 At last, she said, almost in a whisper, her face shamefully suffused: "Yes, ... but you mustn't come any further now. There's the house—where you see those little trees along the 'boulevard. She put out her hand. "Good-bye."

He held it a moment. "Good-bye."

When she glanced back from the gate, he was standing where she had left him, his hand half raised from releasing hers, gazing after her.

She disappeared; and he looked about him, blinking, like a man who has seen a vision and does not recognise the familiar and unchanged world in which it has left him.

He turned dazedly down the street. Beautiful! How beautiful she was! That was his first thought. And it was not a thought so much as a mental picture of her which he could gloat over now, in silence, without the distraction of speech. He framed her face in the hollow of his hands and held it before him—the dear girl's face, laughing up at him from its dimples, with a tenderer gleam in the mischievous eyes! Beautiful! Beau He came down with a startling jolt from the sidewalk into the drifted gutter. He pulled himself together with a half laugh, and hurried away down the avenue like one possessed.

And he was possessed. His eyes were possessed by her smile, his ears by the note of her voice, his brain by the trivial words she had spoken, his nerves by the thrill that had set him shaking when he had tried to say good-bye to her. She had taken him, body and