As she stood there before me quietly, her hands clasped, her eyes looking up into mine, I saw how fair she was, and I wondered.  The picture of Weston in the woods, standing off there gazing at me, came back then, and with it a vague feeling of fear and distrust.  I saw myself as Weston saw me, and I marvelled.

“Mary,” I said, “this morning up there in the woods I told Robert Weston everything, and he stood off just as you are standing now.  It seemed to me he wondered how it could be true, and now I wonder too.  Maybe it’s all a mistake.”

“It’s not a mistake, Mark,” the girl said, and she came to me again and put a hand on each shoulder and looked up.  “If I did not care for you I’d never have given you the promise I did last night.  But I do care for you, Mark, more than for anyone else in the world.  You are big and strong and good—­that’s why—­it’s all any woman can ask.  You are true, Mark—­and that’s more than most men——­”

“But, Mary, there’s Tim,” I protested, for I did not care to usurp to myself the sum of all the virtues allotted to my sex.

“Tim?” said she lightly, as though she had never heard of him.

“Yes, Tim,” I said shortly.  “Why did you choose me instead of a lad like Tim?”

“Mark, I care for you more than anyone else in the world,” said Mary.

“But do you love me?” I asked quickly.

“I think I do,” she said.  But reaching up, she turned my collar again and buttoned my coat against the storm.

XIV

Tim was home in three days.  His few months of town life had wrought many changes in him, and they were for the better.  I was forced to admit that, but I could not help being just a little in awe of him.  He was not as heavy as of old, but there was more firmness in his face and figure.  Perhaps it was his clothes that had given him a strange new grace, for in the old days he was a ponderous, slow-moving fellow.  Now there was a lightness in his step and quickness in his every motion.  Had I not known him, I should have seen in the scrupulous part in his hair a suggestion of the foppish.  But I knew him, and while I liked him best with his old tousled head, and tanned face, and homely hickory shirt, I felt a certain pride that he had taken so well with the world and was learning the ways of the town as well as those of the field and wood.  His gloves did seem foolish, for it was a bitter December day when the blood had best had full swing in the veins, but he held out to me a hand pinched in a few square inches of yellow kid.  The grasp was just as warm though, and I forgave that.  When he threw aside his silly little overcoat and stood before me, so tall and strong, so clean-cut and faultless, from the part in his hair to the shine on his boot-tips, I cried, “Heigh-ho, my fine gentleman!”

Then he blushed.  I suspected that it pleased him vastly.