Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/107

Rh for at least ten minutes after his single inquiry at the end of the performance if he might see her to her door.

It was Reba at last who spoke.

"I've had a very pleasant evening," she said, in her little old-school way.

"You wouldn't go again with me, would you?" he broke out earnestly. "It wouldn't be just the thing, would it? Of course you wouldn't go again with me?"

The pleading tone of his voice could not be lost on one of even so little experience as Reba. It did not displease her. It was rare music to Reba Jerome.

"I might," she heard herself replying.

"Oh, would you? Thursday? There are new pictures twice a week. You don't know quite what it means to a fellow like me, I guess." His voice almost broke.

Reba heard it.

"I'd be very pleased to come."

They said good-night under the light that shone over the front entrance of the Women's Alliance. Of her own accord, Reba extended her white-gloved hand in farewell. Nathaniel Cawthorne held it in just the same reverent manner he had held her bare hand on Saturday night, and long enough this time to say, looking down upon it,

"Thank you for wearing your pretty white gloves for me, miss."

There was scarcely a Monday or Thursday evening during the half-dozen weeks that followed that Reba didn't put on a fresh waist and spotless white kid gloves, and steal out after supper to keep her strange