“You haven’t got any folks and neither have I, so that makes it easy.  I’ll come for you in the morning, about eight o’clock, and we’ll go get a license and get married, and then we can get the ten-o’clock bus out to Frederick.  Oh, girl, I never saw any one like you!  I—­I’ll be good to you—­I’ll take care of you.  It don’t matter if I didn’t ever see you till this afternoon, I’d never find anybody else that I want so much in a hundred thousand years.  I’ve not got a lot of money, but the farm’s mine, all free and clear, and if my wheat turns out all right I’ll have a thousand dollars’ cash outright come the end of the year, even after the taxes are paid and everything.  Won’t you look at me, Anita—­won’t you tell me something?  Don’t you like me?”

The girl had listened with her eyes cast down, her hands nervously picking at the edge of the tablecloth.  But he was not mistaken in her.  She had wherewith to meet him, and her gaze was honest, without coquetry or evasion.

“Oh, I do like you!” she cried with quick colour.  “I do!  I do!  I always thought somebody like you’d come along some day, just like this, and then—­it just seemed foolish to expect it.  But look here.  I told you a story, right off.  My name’s not Anita—­it’s Annie.  I took to pretending it’s Anita because—­it does seem sort of silly, but I got to tell you—­because I saw it in the movies, and it seemed sort of cute and different, and Annie’s such a plain, common name.  But I couldn’t let you go on talking like that and calling me by it, now could I?”

The mutinous young waiter brought their food and thumped it truculently down before them.

“Look out!” said Dean with sudden violent harshness, the vein in his forehead darkening ominously.  “What do you think you’re doing, feeding cattle?”

The boy drew back in confusion, and Annie exclaimed:  “Oh, he didn’t mean it anything against us—­he’s just mad because he has to be a waiter.”

“Well, he’d better be careful; kids can be too smart Aleck.”

The little gust had deflected them away from their own affairs.  But Annie brought them back.  She leaned toward him.

“You make me kind of afraid of you.  If you ever spoke to me like that it’d just about kill me.”

He was contrite.  “Why, I couldn’t ever speak to you like that, honey; it just made me mad the way he banged things down in front of you.  I don’t want people to treat you like that.”

“And you look so fierce, too—­scowling so all the time.”

He put up a brown finger and touched his savage vein.

“Now, now—­you mustn’t mind my look.  All the Dean men are marked like that; it’s in the blood.  It don’t mean a thing.”  He smiled winningly.  “I reckon if you’re beginning to scold me you’re going to marry me, huh?”

Something very sweet and womanly leaped in Annie’s blue eyes.