# Don-A-Dreams/Part 1/Chapter 6
### VI

Don had scarcely more than outgrown knickerbockers; his habit of solitude had kept him as clean-minded as the girl herself; and if it was love that had taken him, it was a love that desired only to look at her and listen to her when she was with him, and to dream of her and wish for her when she was away. It was a boy's love that had no burning, a present happiness that had no doubt of the future and no guilt of the past. But it filled his thoughts with pictures of her that came between him and the pages of his books; and he ran from school hours to her like a child to play.
He came to the house for her quite openly, until she noticed some of his school-fellows grinning at him across the street as he walked with her, and she understood that they would tease him, as they had about the photograph. After that she agreed to meet him at the top of the Park, on the road to their ravine. She did not let him come out to her of an evening, because she had heard his aunt say that he must not neglect his studies; and she made him bring his books ​with him when they went on their walks. She even encouraged him to work, by making him read his translation aloud to her and by pretending to be interested with him in the solution of his "deductions." And as long as he was with her, he could work. It was when he was at his desk in school, or shut up in his room at home, that she kept him idle, his eyes set on the memory of her, and his book forgotten in his hand.
Conroy accompanied them sometimes, but not often. He could be with her of an evening, when Don could not; and though there was no rivalry between them, he knew that Don would not wish to share her, and boyishly he held aloof. They went alone to their green alcoves and grassed recesses, like a pair of lovers in a poem, but with a childish spirit. There were blue-birds to wonder at, the first hepaticas to find, a water-rat for Dexter to go mad about, and the lurking violets, at last, in a sudden, shy profusion. Don broke off the odorous branches of firs and hemlocks to make a dry seat for her, one day after it had rained; and then he backed the seat with a screen of foliage and made her a rough bower. As the weather grew warmer, she felt less like romping along the stream, and they sat oftener in this arbour; and while she listened dreamily, with her head against his arm, he read aloud from his Spenser's "Faerie Queene." Many of the lines were printed in asterisks, because—Don explained—the manuscript had been old and torn, he supposed. But there was much there of knights "yclad in mighty arms" who rode through the woods ​of Faery to slay monsters and rescue maids; and if she sometimes objected that this was not study, Don was able to assure her that Spenser was on his "English course"; and if, while he read, he was the Redcross Knight and she Una "on her palfrey slow," he did not tell her, and she did not guess.
It was all very innocent and friendly—though Don had some bewildering moments when his heart seemed to swell with a choked longing in his chest. Then, two days of wind and rain kept her in the house, where he could only speak with her under conditions of strained formality—for he was at the age when the usages of indoors are an oppression on the spirits—and their return to their haunts gave him the feeling for her which a bright-coloured toy had used to raise in him, a desire to fondle it and rub it against his cheek. When they sat to rest on a great pine—one that had been brought down by the wind in its branches and the rain in its roots—he put his arm around her to support her; she was tired. He spread her hand on his knee and compared his own brown and ink-stained fingers with hers that were dimpled at the knuckles and pink in the nails; and some older instinct woke in him, and he lifted her hand and kissed it. She answered the caress with a little pressure, and smiled absent-mindedly, a far-away look in her eyes.
"What'll you do when I go away?" she asked.
His heart was stifling him. "I don't know. Are you going away?"
"Mother says I must. She says I don't look well."
​He drew her closer, and when she turned, their eyes melted together in a look. His face drooped to hers.
"No," she whispered. "Don't ... please, Don. I promised mother. She said it wasn't right."
He released her, his lips trembling, and turned away. In a moment, she put a hand out and touched his arm. "Read me something, Don," she said.
And neither of them understood what had happened.
They did not understand even when they came to say their last good-byes, on the night before her departure. It was a Sunday; she was to go in the early morning; and all her friends and her mother's had called to spend the evening. Don sat in an awkward silence, without being able to find a word to say; she followed him to the porch when he went out. They shook hands, like their elders. "Well, good-bye," he said.
"Good-bye:"
He waited. "You'll be back?"
"Yes," she promised. "I'll be back."
"I'll wait for you." He put on his cap, and hesitated. "Will you write to me?"
"Oh yes! I'll write—often."
He went down a step. "All right," he said bravely. When he reached the path, he added, "Good-bye."
She watched him out to the gate. He turned there; and she, standing in the light of the door, waved her hand and called "Good-bye."
They parted, as young people do, hopefully. The future, they thought, was all theirs to meet again in.
​He woke, next morning, with a start, and lay blinking at the warm May morning that shone in his window. What—what was it that had happened? Miss Margaret! She had—— He groped under his pillow for his watch; it was eight o'clock. She had gone. Miss Margaret had gone.
The light suddenly looked hard and cold, framed in the sash, like a prison window. His face went blank. The day held no promise. He lay back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling.
It is not in action, but in the intervals of thought, that character grows; and for the next few days Don went about in a quiet muse that aged him more than he knew. He shunned the ravine; he worked with a sort of stupid diligence; and not until Saturday did he even so much as read anything but a school-book. But on Saturday morning he took up his "Faerie Queene " again, and with the first words of the poem a terrible longing gripped him at the heart. He thrust the book in his pocket and hurried out of doors, his cap over his eyes, half-running.
He came breathless to the top of the Park, to the tree under which she used to meet him; and there he stopped, and smiled, and drew a long breath. When he went on again, it was very slowly, his head a little bowed; and when he came to the narrow path that led down into the gully, he stepped back to let her go ahead of him, and nodded and laughed.
At midday, he came out into the road again, with the same slow air. There was no pathetic wistfulness in his face. There was something set and blind in his gaze, but there was also a dreamy smile. And ​in the buttonhole of his lapel, he had a little bunch of violets.
A girlish letter from her awaited him on his return to the house; but it was as formal as a schoolroom composition, in spite of its "Dear Don" and its "Your loving friend, Margaret Richardson." It was perfumed faintly, and that made him gulp; but when he had once put it in the little box in which he kept a dried starfish and a bit of broken agate and some other boyish treasures, he did not return to it. His cousin whistled from the lawn while he was at dinner; he pleaded that he had to prepare his Monday's lessons, and as soon as Conroy had gone, he hurried away to his tryst, with his Odyssey in his pocket—and also a penknife with which he was to cut new branches for her seat under the firs.
He came like a sleep-walker to the fallen pine on which they had sat together, and he stopped, smiling, as if it were a barrier in his way. Dexter leaped over it and went on. He looked after the dog, swaying irresolutely. Suddenly he sat down.
His face had turned pale. A look of pain slowly wrinkled around his eyes. Without moving his head, he lifted his hand to his knee, and his fingers trembled and twitched in a sort of empty groping. He turned—and the blood rushed to his face, and his eyes shut, and his mouth gasped open—and he slipped to his knees on the grass and sank down in it with a sob.
And if he did not understand then, it was because the heart-hunger, the ache of longing, the fever of loneliness that seized and shook and burned in him, was like the blow of a grief that stuns.