Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/278

Rh Well, Aunt Mary has been asking me to go and stay with her over the winter for two or three years now,' she replied reflectively. 'She thinks that it must be dull for a girl here always and they have pretty lively times over there.'

"Baxter did not doubt it, and the thought made him extremely uncomfortable. Aunt Mary lived in a town a full week's journey away. She had sons; inevitably the sons had friends. It was bad enough to keep away from Janet in an agony of self-torturing diffidence, but for Janet to be a week's journey off, surrounded by smart city beaux and forgetting Creek Fall in a continual round of city gaiety, was unsupportable.

Say, Janet' But Janet said nothing. On the gentleman's side it was certainly one of those occasions when silence is not golden, but Baxter got no further. Nevertheless, with bold abandonment he seized her hand as it lay irresistibly near his own, and then, as she manifested no inclination to run away, he possessed himself of the other and held them fast.

“For perhaps two whole minutes the world stood still. To an outsider the situation required no words, and certainly none were spoken; Baxter even at that moment could not key himself up to the pitch of saying what he wished to say, while Janet sat with quiet, surrendered hands, and face half turned away.

"At the end of those two minutes Baxter's fatal diffidence again possessed him. He thought that he had better go home at once and leave Janet to think things quietly over before they were both committed to an almost irrevocable step. He would have gone, and she, with the unconquerable modesty of the true American maiden, even in a Western State in the 'forties, she could have spoken no word to hold him though her heart was breaking. Doubtless he would have kept away for a