“I like him well enough to try to be nice to him,” she said. “I hope I don’t have any more of these beastly sties for a month or two,” and quite forgot that she had any more infirmities—as who would not?
For a time all the shyness which had accompanied her from her youth upward vanished literally as if by magic.
She would go down into the other school at every opportunity, just to see the young man and speak to him.
It was the happiest and most natural part of her life.
“I wonder if I could make him love me too,” she thought. And she used to watch him in church or wherever else it might be, and keep saying, “Love me, love me, love me,” and in some ways it was very great fun. The greatest fun was to say, “Love me, love me,” when she was talking to him, in a voice but he couldn’t hear.
But there came a day when all this golden love cloud gathered into one of purple.
Deborah fell seriously in love with him, and all the fun and the laughter died out of it.
Still everyone went on laughing just the same as on that first day when she ran into school and told them she had found an ideal man.
And because she had begun by laughing herself she was bound to keep it up, and no one saw the difference.
One day she saw him talking to another girl, and it was the first time she had ever seen him speaking to another woman. The girl was very pretty, with blue eyes and brown curly hair, and she was little too, but she was a pretty figure.