Lo, Michael!

by Grace Livingston Hill

But there followed other invitations, some of which he accepted and some of which he declined. Still, the handsome, independent young Adonis was in great demand in spite of his peculiar habit of always being in earnest about everything. Perhaps they liked him and ran after him but the more because of his inaccessibility, and the fact that he was really doing something in the world. For it began to be whispered about among those who knew—and perhaps Emily Holt was the originator—that Michael was going to be something brilliant in the world of worth-while-things one of these days.

The tickets that Endicott promised him had arrived in due time, and anxious to please his benefactor, even in his alienation, Michael faithfully attended concerts and lectures, and enjoyed them to the full, borrowing from his hours of sleep to make up what he had thus spent, rather than from his work or his study. And thus he grew in knowledge of the arts, and in love of all things great, whether music, or pictures, or great minds.

Matters stood thus when Starr appeared on the scene.

The young girl made her début that winter, and the papers were full of her pictures and the entertainments given in her honor. She was dined and danced and recepted day after day and night after night, and no débutante had ever received higher praise of the critics for beauty, grace, and charm of manner.

Michael read them all, carefully cut out and preserved a few pleasant things that were written about her, looked at the pictures, and turned from the pomp and pride of her triumph to the little snapshot of herself on horseback in the Park with her groom, which she had sent to him when she was a little girl. That was his, and his alone, but these others belonged to the world, the world in which he had no part.

For from all this gaiety of society Michael now held aloof. Invitations he received, not a few, for he was growing more popular every day, but he declined them all. A fine sense of honor kept him from going anywhere that Starr was sure to be. He had a right, of course, and it would have been pleasant in a way to have her see that he was welcome in her world; but always there was before his mental vision the memory of her mother’s biting words as she put him down from the glorified presence of her world, into an existence of shame and sin and sorrow. He felt that Starr was so far above him that he must not hurt her by coming too near. And so, in deference to the vow that he had taken when the knowledge of his unworthiness had first been presented to him, he stayed away.

Starr, as she heard more and more of his conquests in her world, wondered and was piqued that he came not near her. And one day meeting him by chance on Fifth Avenue, she greeted him graciously and invited him to call.

Michael thanked her with his quiet manner, while his heart was in a tumult over her beauty, and her dimpled smiles that blossomed out in the old childish ways, only still more beautifully, it seemed to him. He went in the strength of that smile many days: but he did not go to call upon her.

The days passed into weeks and months, and still he did not appear, and Starr, hearing more of his growing inaccessibility, determined to show the others that she could draw him out of his shell. She humbled her Endicott pride and wrote him a charming little note asking him to call on one of the “afternoons” when she and her mother held court. But Michael, though he treasured the note, wrote a graceful, but decided refusal.

This angered the young woman, exceedingly, and she decided to cut him out of her good graces entirely. And indeed the whirl of gaiety in which she was involved scarcely gave her time for remembering old friends. In occasional odd moments when she thought of him at all, it was with a vague kind of disappointment, that he too, with all the other things of her childhood, had turned out to be not what she had thought.