Page:My Life and Loves.djvu/215

 "Really?" she scoffed, smiling, "That's not a custom here".

Are you less generous than they are?" I asked and the next moment I had taken her face in my hands and kissed her on the lips. She put her hands on my shoulders and left her eyes on mine: "We're going to he friends", she said, "I felt it when I saw you: don't stay away too long!"

"Will you see me tomorrow afternoon?" I asked: "I want that dance lesson!" "Surely" she replied, "I'll tell Lily in the morning." And once more our hands met: I tried to draw her to me for another kiss; but she held back with a smiling—"To morrow afternoon!" "Tell me your name", I begged, "so that I may think of it". "Lorna" she replied, "you funny boy!" and I went my way with pulses hammering, blood aflame and hope in my heart.

Next morning I called again upon Smith; but the pretty servant, "Rose", she said her name was, told me that he was nearly always out at Judge Stevens' "five or six miles out," she thought it was; "they always come for him in a buggy", she added. So I said I'd write and make an appointment and I did write and asked him to let me see him next morning.

That same morning Willie recommended to me a pension kept by a Mrs. Gregory, an English-woman, the wife of an old Baptist clergyman, who would take good care of me for four dollars a week. Immediately I went with him to see her and was delighted to find that she lived only about a hundred yards from Mrs. Mayhew on the opposite side of the street. Mrs. Gregory was a large, motherly woman evidently a lady, who had founded this boarding-house to provide for a rather feckless husband and two children, a big pretty girl, Kate and a lad, a couple of years younger. Mrs. Gregory was