In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,
Queen, lily and rose, in one;
Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,
To the flowers, and be their sun.”
In the blaze of that glance Hinpoha’s romantic heart melted like a lump of wax. The room swam in a rose-colored mist. The great thing that she had read about in books had happened to her; she was in love! It was not long before the whole school knew about the affair. Whenever there was a sentimental passage in the book Professor Knoblock looked at Hinpoha and at her alone. He often detained her a moment after class to inquire if that last paragraph had been entirely clear to her; he thought she had looked not quite satisfied with his explanation. As he roomed in the next street to her home he generally met her on the corner in the morning and walked to school with her. Certain sour-dispositioned damsels in the class, who had made eyes at the new Lochinvar in vain, made sneering remarks about a girl who had so few boy friends in the class that she had to ogle a teacher; others sighed enviously when they looked at her woman’s crown of glory and realized their handicap; the Winnebagos regarded the whole thing as the workings of fate, pure and simple, for was it not even as the Seventh Daughter of a Seventh Daughter had predicted?
As for Hinpoha herself, she was too transported to care what anyone else thought about it. She was surrounded by a rarified atmosphere and the voices of earth troubled her not. Just now she sat blushing deeply and crushing in her hand a note which had appeared mysteriously between the pages of her Selections from the Standard English Poets. It was written in Mr. Knoblock’s slanting backhand, and read:
“My Dear Miss Bradford:
“Never have I seen such glorious hair as yours. I cannot take my eyes from it while you are in the room, and it haunts me by night. May I ask a great favor of you—that you grant me one lock, one small lock, as a keepsake? I fear you will be too modest to make this gift in person, and all I ask is that you slip it into the dictionary on my desk.”
The signature was a long ornamental K, with a running vine entwined about its upright stroke.
Hinpoha scarcely raised her eyes above the level of her book during the whole recitation. She sat nervously toying with a long perfect curl that hung down over her shoulder. Toward the close of the recitation period she came out of her abstraction and touched the boy in front of her on the shoulder. “Lend me your penknife,” she whispered in answer to his look of inquiry. The Senior Literature Class occupied the last hour of the day, and as Mr. Knoblock had no session room, the passing of the class left the room empty. On this day Mr. Knoblock left the room with the class on the stroke of the bell, and the boys and girls, trooping out in a hurry to get home, did not notice that Hinpoha loitered. She glanced around nervously, satisfied herself that she was unobserved and then darted toward the dictionary on Mr. Knoblock’s desk. Going out of the door a minute later she ran violently into Katherine, who had carried out her inkwell instead of her English book, and was coming back to replace it. Katherine looked at her curiously.