At the other end of the line the young man waited as Cecile Dionne hesitated. She knew that to refuse to see him was to refuse to live and she wanted to live; wanted to forget that she was a Dionne quintuplet, a medical curiosity to be stared at and discussed so that there remained no small, secret corner of her life she could call her own. But was Philippe Langlois, the young man one the phone, like all the others? Was he trying to worm his way into her life so that he, too, could make use of her? Cecile could not be sure, but because his face had haunted her dreams since she had seen him, a few weeks before, leaning against a tree, she gave him the benefit of the doubt, prepared to endure the consequences if she were being deceived. She agreed to meet Philippe.

It has been a warm August evening the night she first saw him. Cecile had climbed the slopes of Mount Royal to hear the Montreal Symphony Orchestra play extracts from Les Sylphides. As she listened to the music she felt that someone was looking at her. She turned her head and saw a young man leaning against a nearby tree. He was watching her but his eyes were reserved and gentle. The moon was bright enough for her to notice that he had brown, slightly wavy hair; that he was tall and carried himself well. It was a fleeting vision. The moon disappeared behind a cloud as he walked past her - and out of her life. They had not exchanged a single word, but their eyes had met and Cecile knew this stranger had captured her heart.

Philippe has called because he could not forget the sensitive face of the girl he had seen at the mountain concert. When he had looked at her he had no idea who she was or where she lived. He didn't know if he would ever see her again. Then one day he saw her picture in a newspaper. He didn't want to believe it, but it was the same girl and her name was Cecile Dionne. What could he, a technician with the CBC, possibly do now? It looked hopeless, but his feeling was so intense that he phoned her. They arranged a meeting in the quintuplets' apartment on Cote St. Luc road in Montreal.

That was over three years ago. Today, Cecile is a happy young Montreal housewife named Mrs. Philippe Langlois. Her husband still works as a technician with the CBC, and they live in a modern, seven-room house that they decorated themselves. The terrible years are behind Cecile. With Philippe's help she is trying to forget what it has meant to be a Dionne quintuplet. It was not her fault that she shared her mother's womb with four sisters, but the event is so rare (it occurs only once in every 52,200,625 births) that from the moment she uttered her first cry, Cecile was doomed.

Because she and her sisters had survived their dramatic birth in the Dionne farmhouse between Corbeil and Callander, Ont., on May 28, 1934, the five little girls were not to be left alone. They became a major tourist attraction. They were taken from their parents and taught to sing French-Canadian folk songs to please the crowds who came to stare at them during the hours the Dionne nursery was open to the public. They spent long hours under hot lights posing for photographs. Small stones were taken from the soil near where they were born and sold as "fertility pebbles." More than half a million pebbles were bought by barren women. The fact that the quintuplets were of the same sex; that they looked so much alike; that even the lobes of their ears had the same design, did not seem to them a valid reason why they should be completely identified with each other, or why they should dress alike, even though it was the custom. They were different people and they wanted to prove it.

By 1954, the year Cecile met Philippe, the sisters were living separate lives. Marie had wanted to be a nun and she entered the cloistered order of the Sisters of the Very Blessed Sacrament in Quebec City. Annette was completing her domestic science courses at a convent in Nicolet, Que. Cecile and Yvonne began their nursing training at Notre Dame de L'Esperance Hospital in Montreal. Cecile's decision to become a nurse fulfilled a need in herself. Like her sisters, she had been deprived of tenderness and understanding. Now she wanted to spend her hoarded compassion on relieving human suffering. Emilie, to whom Marie's entrance into the cloister had been a severe blow, died in a nursing home on Aug. 6, 1954, broken-hearted by the absence of her sister she loved so much. Not long afterwards, Marie left her austere call to return to her sisters in Montreal.

Twenty years had gone by since the day Cecile had buried her plump little hands in the icing of her first birthday cake. The photo taken at that time, as well as all the pictures that have followed it, show that Cecile has rarely looked a camera in the face. When she fell in love with Philippe Langlois she discovered, for the first time, that it did one good to trust another person. It was deliverance to unburden herself, episode by episode, of the weight of her fame. Her childhood, her adolescence, her young womanhood became easier memories to live with as she told them all to Philippe. In the process, she discovered herself. She realized that by trying to avoid publicity the quintuplets had only succeeded in arousing the curiosity of the entire world. Because they eluded reporters they were chased. If they had just been there, in the middle of people who were fond of them, their lives would have been as simple and as free as the most ordinary citizen's.

Cecile had lived apart from the world, linked to her sisters, with whom she had shared not only her birth, but a communal life. Any other existence was unknown to her. For each of the quintuplets humanity was confined to knowing and loing four other persons in a closed circle. It was a repressed life of introspection and spiritual meditaion. The nuns at the convent in Nicolet had taught Cecile how to sew and to cook. She had studied design, elocution and typing. She took piano lessons to break the monotony of her free hours, but there was little opportunity for cultural growth. Philippe helped her to discover the world.

He lived alone in Montreal, homesick for the large family he had left behind in Quebec City. Outwardly, he was the the very opposite of Cecile. He was gay and had a lively sense of fun. He got a kick out of life. Cecile needed reassurance and understanding. He gave them to her. He didn't tell his family how his romance was progressing because Cecile gloried in hiding her happiness from a world that had always intruded into her private life. Now, what was dearest to her, she wished to keep to herself. They kept their secret nearly three years. They walked along St. Catherine street hundreds of times, mingling with the faceless crowd. They went for drives whenever they had a free moment to escape the uproar of the city. They were alone in the Montreal flower shop Marie opened. Philippe left his CBC job to work with Marie in her Salon Emilie and no one suspected he was Cecile's choice.

For the first time in life, Cecile felt free. She went about the city unnoticed and unmolested. She and Philippe visited art exhibitions, went to the theatre, listened to concerts. She learned that music consisted of more than French-Canadian folk songs sung by five little girls. She began to appreciate Bach, Chopin, Mozart. She read Lamartine Verlaine and Victor Hugo. With Philippe, she visited the Langlois family in Quebec City and found herself accepted for herself alone. She developed a passion for French-Canadian and Eskimo handicrafts and she decided she liked French and Italian films for their realism, preferring them to the Hollywood product.

In the playroom of the quintuplets' Montreal apartment they ran off travelogues and documentaries of all kinds, because the curious crowds had prevented Cecile and her sisters from getting to know they world in any other way. But the new freedom made them take chances. One afternoon the four sisters decided to risk going shopping together with Philippe. They entered a store on St. Catherine street, but were recognized immediately and a crowd collected around them. There was only one way out. They separated and went home individually. Since that experience, the sisters prefer to appear in public singly, away from each other, so thirsty are they for a taste of the liberty enjoyed by other girls their age to come and go as they please.

During their courtship, Cecile and Philippe managed to live the sort of lives young lovers lead everywhere, but the secret love affair could not remain a secret forever. The newspapers found out at last and Philippe's picture was printed from one end of Canada to the other. Cecile Dionne felt she had been dispossessed and it took all her new-found confidence to accept this further intrusion into her private life. She knew, and Philippe knew, that they were going to marry. They had become officially engaged on Christmas Eve, 1956. But there was something Cecile had to finish first.

On Sept. 8 last year - the same day she graduated from nursing school - Cecile and Philippe, with a priest who was a friend, were returning from the graduation ceremonies. They decided suddenly that the blessing of the engagement ring should take place there and then, without fuss. They got out of the car and the simple ceremony was performed on the steps of a Pine avenue house, with the stars and the priest as the only witnesses. They were married two months later, on Nov. 23, in Corbeil, Ont., near where Cecile was born. The dream she had thought impossible had been realized. She was happy, she loved someone, she had a home of her own. Annette too has found a new life. She married Germain Allard last September.