Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/237

Rh and he didn't as much as look tenderly at her again the whole afternoon.

Oh, she must be bolder, braver, prove to him somehow how deeply she cared. She hadn't even replied to his remark about the sun.

"Oh, why," fiercely she asked herself later, when it was too late, "why didn't I tell him that I like his sunshine—hate and despise the cold shadowy place I've been growing in so long. Oh, why did I sit there silent and dumb, as if I agreed?"

During the long following week, when not a single one of Dr. Booth's notes fell out of the reference-book he returned to her at the close of each of his lectures, she blamed herself over and over again for her misleading reserve. When finally he did ask her "to play with him" again, relief surged consolingly through her, and the vehemence of his joy at being with her again made her so happy that she gave him back his caresses with a generosity that amazed even herself.

Still he didn't ask her to bear his name (how often she had written it of late, Rebecca Booth—she liked the alliteration of it—on scraps of paper destroyed immediately afterward), but never mind, she comforted herself. He would ask her soon. She had read somewhere the time of courtship was the happiest time of all. He was aware of that, of course, and possibly was prolonging the period. He could not know that there were certain events in her past life that made such a long courtship as theirs difficult for her; that there was a confession she longed to make to him; a confession, too, she longed to make to somebody else as soon as he gave her the right. Reba had not written to Nathan