After John had waited a weary time, the form of the girl appeared above the crest of the hill.  She was holding up the skirt of her gown, and glided over the earth so rapidly that she appeared to be running.  Beat! beat! oh, heart of John, if there is aught in womanhood to make you throb; if there is aught in infinite grace and winsomeness; if there is aught in perfect harmony of color and form and movement; if there is aught of beauty, in God’s power to create that can set you pulsing, beat! for the fairest creature of His hand is hastening to greet you.  The wind had dishevelled her hair and it was blowing in fluffy curls of golden red about her face.  Her cheeks were slightly flushed with joy and exercise, her red lips were parted, and her eyes—­but I am wasting words.  As for John’s heart it almost smothered him with its beating.  He had never before supposed that he could experience such violent throbbing within his breast and live.  But at last she was at the gate, in all her exquisite beauty and winsomeness, and something must be done to make the heart conform to the usages of good society.  She, too, was in trouble with her breathing, but John thought that her trouble was owing to exertion.  However that may have been, nothing in heaven or earth was ever so beautiful, so radiant, so graceful, or so fair as this girl who had come to give herself to John.  It seems that I cannot take myself away from the attractive theme.

“Ah, Sir John, you did come,” said the girl, joyously.

“Yes,” John succeeded in replying, after an effort, “and you—­I thank you, gracious lady, for coming.  I do not deserve—­” the heart again asserted itself, and Dorothy stood by the gate with downcast eyes, waiting to learn what it was that John did not deserve.  She thought he deserved everything good.

“I fear I have caused you fatigue,” said John, again thinking, and with good reason, that he was a fool.

The English language, which he had always supposed to be his mother tongue, had deserted him as if it were his step-mother.  After all, the difficulty, as John subsequently said, was that Dorothy’s beauty had deprived him of the power to think.  He could only see.  He was entirely disorganized by a girl whom he could have carried away in his arms.

“I feel no fatigue,” replied Dorothy.

“I feared that in climbing the hill you had lost your breath,” answered disorganized John.

“So I did,” she returned.  Then she gave a great sigh and said, “Now I am all right again.”

All right?  So is the morning sun, so is the arching rainbow, and so are the flitting lights of the north in midwinter.  All are “all right” because God made them, as He made Dorothy, perfect, each after its kind.

A long, uneasy pause ensued.  Dorothy felt the embarrassing silence less than John, and could have helped him greatly had she wished to do so.  But she had made the advances at their former meetings, and as she had told me, she “had done a great deal more than her part in going to meet him.”  Therefore she determined that he should do his own wooing thenceforward.  She had graciously given him all the opportunity he had any right to ask.