And Ralph sat down by the fire, and talked of his school and her school, and everything else but what he wanted to talk about.  And then the conversation drifted back to Flat Creek, and to the walk through the pasture, and to the box-elder tree, and to the painful talk in the lane.  And Hannah begged to be forgiven, and Ralph laughed at the idea that she had done anything wrong.  And she praised his goodness to Shocky, and he drew her little note out of—­But I agreed not tell you where he kept it.  And then she blushed, and he told how the note had sustained him, and how her white face kept up his courage in his flight down the bed of Clifty Creek.  And he sat a little nearer, to show her the note that he had carried in his bosom—­I have told it!  And—­but I must not proceed.  A love-scene, ever so beautiful in itself, will not bear telling.  And so I shall leave a little gap just here, which you may fill up as you please. . . .  Somehow, they never knew how, they got to talking about the future instead of the past, after that, and to planning their two lives as one life.  And . . .  And when Miss Nancy and Mrs. Thomson returned later in the evening, Ralph was standing by the mantel-piece, but Shocky noticed that his chair was close to Hannah’s.  And good Miss Nancy Sawyer looked in Hannah’s face and was happy.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

“HOW IT CAME OUT”

We are all children in reading stories.  We want more than all else to know how it all came out at the end, and, if our taste is not perverted, we like it to come out well.  For my part, ever since I began to write this story, I have been anxious to know how it was going to come out.

Well, there were very few invited.  It took place at ten in the morning.  The “preacher-in-charge” came, of course.  Miss Nancy Sawyer was there.  But Ralph’s uncle was away, and Aunt Matilda had a sore throat and couldn’t come.  Perhaps the memory of the fact that she had refused Mrs. Thomson, the pauper, a bed for two nights, affected her throat.  But Miss Nancy and her sister were there, and the preacher.  And that was all, besides the family, and Bud and Martha.  Of course Bud and Martha came.  And driving Martha to a wedding in a “jumper” was the one opportunity Bud needed.  His hands were busy, his big boots were out of sight, and it was so easy to slip from Ralph’s love affair to his own, that Bud somehow, in pulling Martha Hawkins’s shawl about her, stammered out half a proposal, which Martha, generous soul, took for the whole ceremony, and accepted.  And Bud was so happy that Ralph guessed from his face and voice that the agony was over, and Bud was betrothed at last to the “gal as was a gal.”