all crowded with strangers--and there stood Joan.

It was natural that he should believe, under those circumstances,
that he and she did not meet by mere accident, that they had been
brought together by design--all the more natural when he listened to
her story of mental and physical imprisonment and came to see,
during their daily stolen meetings, that he was as necessary to her
as she was to him. Every time he left her and watched her run back
to that old house of old people, it was borne in upon him more
definitely that he was appointed in the cosmic scheme to rescue Joan
from her peculiar cage and help her to try her wings. All about that
young fresh, eager creature whose eyes were always turned so
ardently toward the city, his imagination and superstition built a
bower of love.

He had never met a girl in any way like her--one who wanted so much
and would give so little in return for it, who had an eel-like way
of dodging hard-and-fast facts and who had made up her mind with all
the zest and thoughtlessness of youth to mold life, when finally she
could prove how much alive she was, into no other shape than the one
which most appealed to her. She surprised and delighted him with her
quick mental turns and twists, and although she sometimes made him
catch his breath at her astoundingly frank expression of
individualism, he told himself that she was still in the chrysalis
stage and could only get a true and normal hang of things after
rubbing shoulders with what she called life with a capital L.

Two weeks slipped away more quickly than these two young things had
ever known them to go, and the daily meetings, utterly guileless and
free from flirtation, were the best part of the day; but there was a