“I—­I reckon I am,” she said, and then confessed herself a brave adventurer and philosopher in one.  “Yes, I’d be a fool to sit round and make excuses and pretend it wouldn’t do to be so out of the ordinary when here you are and here I am, and it means—­our whole lives.  I don’t care, either, if I didn’t ever set eyes on you till to-day—­I know you’re all right and that what you say’s true.  And I feel as if I’d known you for years and years.”

“That’s the way I felt about you the minute I looked at you.  Oh”—­he gave a vast and shaking sigh—­“I can’t hardly believe my luck.  Eat up your supper and let’s get out of here.  Maybe there’s some stores open yet and I could buy you a ring.”

“And I have to be in my boarding house by half-past ten,” offered Annie, “or I’ll be locked out.  What the girls are going to say when I come in and tell ’em——­” She looked at him with intense and piteous question—­the question that every woman at the moment of surrender asks sometimes with her lips, but always with her heart:  “It is going to be all right, isn’t it?  And you’ll be good to me?”

“So help me God,” said young Wesley Dean.

* * * * *

The farm lay high, as Wesley had said.  Indeed, all the way from Baltimore they had seemed to be going into the hills, those placidly rounding friendly Maryland hills that rise so softly, so gradually that the traveller is not conscious of ascent.  The long straight road dips across them gallantly, a silver band of travel to tie them to the city, with little cities or towns pendent from it at wide intervals.  Trees edge it with a fringe of green; poor trees, maimed by the trimmers’ saws and shears into twisted caricatures of what a tree should be, because the telegraph wires and telephone wires must pass, and oaks and locusts, pines and maples, must be butchered of their spreading branches to give them room.

It was along this highway that the motor bus, filled with passengers and baggage and driven with considerably more haste than discretion, carried the newly married pair.  Annie’s eyes grew wide at the wonder and beauty of it.  She was not at all afraid.  She snuggled her hand into Wes’s and loved it—­and loved him, too, with his look of pride and joy in her.  She was content to be silent and let him talk.  Now and then she looked at the little turquoise ring on her finger above the shiny new wedding ring, and loved that, too, for he had chosen it at once from the trayful offered them, blurting out that she must have it because it matched her eyes.

“All this country out here’s rich,” he bragged, “but Fred’rick County’s far the richest land of all.  Richest in the state.  Maybe richest in the whole United States, I dunno.  And all the farms are big.  Great big farms—­and great big teams to till ’em.  People don’t use mules here s’much as they do over on the Eastern Shore.  And there’s not any sand, like there is over there—­in spots, that is.”