“We are talking around in a circle,” said Harrington crossly. “I was speaking of loving one another. From the moment I laid eyes upon you I knew that you were mine. Does it mean nothing to you that I came after you when I did not even know who you were? Does it mean nothing that the vision of your face stayed in my heart——”
“From the moment I laid eyes on you I knew that you were not mine,” said Joyce suddenly. “It is getting very late. Hear! The clocks are striking twelve. I must go home this minute!” Her heart had suddenly gone into a panic. She wanted to get away by herself and think. Life was a strange thing. Was this man going to insist on being in her life?
Harrington, deeply offended, led her to her home in silence. She bade him good night and received a stiff good night in answer. He stalked away in the moonlight, a handsome picture of a man with a rising future, and much that was good and beautiful for a maiden to think upon. Yet she turned into her little warm room as to a haven, and knelt down by her couch.
“Oh, my dear heavenly Father! Keep me. Don’t let me get bewildered by things. I don’t want to love any one now, please. And I know he isn’t a right one to love.”
From that night forth she unconsciously ceased to pray for him. It seemed somehow as if her duty were done there, and it was not for her to further seek his salvation. It seemed almost to her as if he desired her soul’s destruction, so determined had he been to drag her away into his world. It almost frightened her when she thought about it. For several days thereafter she kept to herself as much as possible when at school.
For several days Harrington maintained a grave aloofness toward her, did not come to her room, nor appear in the hall when she would be likely to be about. When he needed to give a message to her he sent it through one of the seniors, or wrote a stiff note signing himself J. S. Harrington.
Joyce felt that she was being punished, and managed not to have to go to the office at all that week. She never had been a frequenter of his office at any time, however, so that was scarcely noticeable.
But one morning he happened to pass her room quite early, before scarcely anybody had entered the building, and he heard her singing softly to herself as she put the arithmetic problems on the blackboard for the day.
“And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;