"Well, you'll kill her among you," was Trent's threatening rejoinder; and filled with a righteous fury against literature he went back again to knock at the door of Christina's empty room. Once his mother came up also, but the girl, it appeared, was always out now, while the rejected manuscript thickened each morning upon the threshold. Several times Mrs. Trent arranged a little tray of luncheon and sent it up stairs by the old negro servant, but the message brought back was always that Christina was not at home. And then gradually, as the weeks went by, the dignity and the pathos of her struggle were surrounded in Trent's mind by a romantic halo. Her beauty borrowed from his poetic fancy the peculiar touch of atmosphere it lacked, and his thoughts dwelt more and more upon her slender, girlish figure, her smooth brown hair, and the flower-like sweetness of her face.
Then just as he had grown almost hopeless of ever seeing her again, he found her one evening in the elevator as he went up to his mother's rooms. The touch of her cold little hand on his sent a sudden shock to his heart, and while he looked anxiously into her face, he saw her go deadly pale and bite her lip sharply as if to bring back her consciousness by the sting of pain.
"You are ill," he said eagerly; "don't deny it, for haven't I eyes? Yes, you must, you shall come with me in to mother."
Even then she would have turned proudly away, but with his impulsive, lover's sympathy he led her from the elevator upon the landing on which he lived. "She is waiting for you—she wants you," he urged with passion; "and can't you see—oh, Christina, I want you, too!"
But his fervour only left her the more cold and shrinking, and she shook her head with a refusal that was almost angry.
"How dare you? Why did you make me come out?" she asked. "I must go back—I am not well—oh, I must go back!"
Over the angry tones of her voice he saw her entreating eyes shining like wet flowers, and as he looked into them it came to him in a revelation of knowledge that the meaning of everything that had been was made clear at last. He knew now why he had succeeded where Christina had failed—he knew why Laura had refused his love, and why, even in his misery, her refusal had left his heart untouched. And beyond all these things, he realised that now his boyhood was over and that from the experience of this one moment he had become a man.