"Come in," she whispered, coloring with pleasure under his gaze; and she
made haste to shut the door after him, with a luxurious impatience of the
cold. She led the way into the room from which she had come, and set down
the lamp on the corner of the piano, while he slipped off his overcoat and
swung it over the end of the sofa. They drew up chairs to the stove,
in which the smouldering fire, revived by the opened draft, roared and
snapped. It was midnight, as the sharp strokes of a wooden clock declared
from the kitchen, and they were alone together, and all the other inmates
of the house were asleep. The situation, scarcely conceivable to another
civilization, is so common in ours, where youth commands its fate and
trusts solely to itself, that it may be said to be characteristic of the
New England civilization wherever it keeps its simplicity. It was not
stolen or clandestine; it would have interested every one, but would have
shocked no one in the village if the whole village had known it; all that a
girl's parents ordinarily exacted was that they should not be waked up.

"Ugh!" said the girl. "It seems as if I never should get warm." She leaned
forward, and stretched her hands toward the stove, and he presently rose
from the rocking-chair in which he sat, somewhat lower than she, and lifted
her sack to throw it over her shoulders. But he put it down and took up his
overcoat.

"Allow my coat the pleasure," he said, with the ease of a man who is not
too far lost to be really flattering.

"Much obliged to the coat," she replied, shrugging herself into it and
pulling the collar close about her throat. "I wonder you didn't put it on
the sorrel. You could have tied the sleeves around her neck."