CHAPTER XX

She was indeed "looking forward" to that evening, but in a cloud
of apprehension; and, although she could never have guessed it,
this was the simultaneous condition of another person--none other
than the guest for whose pleasure so much cooking and scrubbing
seemed to be necessary. Moreover, Mr. Arthur Russell's
premonitions were no product of mere coincidence; neither had any
magical sympathy produced them. His state of mind was rather the
result of rougher undercurrents which had all the time been
running beneath the surface of a romantic friendship.

Never shrewder than when she analyzed the gentlemen, Alice did
not libel him when she said he was one of those quiet men who are
a bit flirtatious, by which she meant that he was a bit
"susceptible," the same thing--and he had proved himself
susceptible to Alice upon his first sight of her. "There!" he
said to himself. "Who's that?" And in the crowd of girls at his
cousin's dance, all strangers to him, she was the one he wanted
to know.

Since then, his summer evenings with her had been as secluded as
if, for three hours after the falling of dusk, they two had drawn
apart from the world to some dear bower of their own. The little
veranda was that glamorous nook, with a faint golden light
falling through the glass of the closed door upon Alice, and
darkness elsewhere, except for the one round globe of the street
lamp at the corner. The people who passed along the sidewalk,
now and then, were only shadows with voices, moving vaguely under
the maple trees that loomed in obscure contours against the