Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/121

 He woke to the fact that he had been conspicuously dull all the evening; that they looked on him as a silent boor whose acquaintance was not worth acknowledging; that even she must be ashamed of him when she compared his conduct with Conroy's. What a clumsy dolt he must have seemed! What an ass he was to behave so!

He hurried down the path to get away from the scene of his disgrace as soon as possible, but Conroy caught up to him at the gate and accompanied him to the street corner with a reminiscent chuckling of self satisfaction that was a salt in Don's wounds. When he was alone again, he wandered dispiritedly around the streets, chafing with discomfiture and still so hungry with the unappeased desire to see her and hear her that he could not face the emptiness of his room. He came back to look at the Kimball house, hiding from a street-lamp, behind a tree-trunk, across the road; and he watched the lighted windows darken one by one, newly aware of how she was shut in from him by the conventions of the world, and feeling himself walled out with his dreams, longing and lonely, under the inscrutable cold glitter of the stars.

  was too shy to face the Kimballs again, and she did not invite him to do so; for Miss Kimball had made a household joke of his reply that he did not know 