“When you know I’m simply dying for you,” she responded.

He smiled at her without moving.  “Then answer my question, and there’s no drawing back this time remember.”

“The question you asked me?  Repeat it, please.”

“I’ve said it three times already, and that’s enough.”

“Must I put it into words?  Oh Abel, can’t you see it?”

Lifting her chin, he laughed softly as he stooped and kissed her.  “I’ve seen it several times before, darling.  Now I want it put into words—­just plain ones.”

“Then, Mr. Abel Revercomb,” she returned demurely, “I should like very much to marry you, if you have no objection.”

The next instant her mockery fled, and in one of those spells of sadness, which seemed so alien to her, and yet so much a part of her, she clung to him, sobbing.

“Abel, I love you so, be good to me,” she entreated.

“Good to you!” he exclaimed, crushing her to him.

“Oh, those dreadful days since we quarrelled!”

“Why did you do it, darling, since you suffered as well as I?”

“I can’t tell—­there’s something in me like that, I don’t know what it is—­but we’ll quarrel again after this, I suppose.”

“Then we deserve to be punished and I hope we shall be.”

“How will that help?  It’s just life and we can’t make it different.”  She drew gently away from him, while a clairvoyance wiser than her years saddened her features.  “I wonder if love ever lasts?” she whispered half to herself.

But there was no room in his more practical mind for the question.  “Ours will, sweetheart—­how can you doubt it?  Haven’t I loved you for the last ten years, not counting the odd days?”

“And in all those years you kissed me once, while in the last five minutes you’ve kissed me—­how many times?  You are wasteful, Abel.”

“And you’re a dreadful little witch—­not a woman.”

“I suppose I am, and a nice girl wouldn’t talk like this.  I’m not the wife you’re wanting, Abel.”

“The first and last and only one, my darling.”

“Judy Hatch would suit you better if she wasn’t in love with the rector.”

“Confound Judy Hatch!  I’ll stop your mouth with kisses if you mention her again.”

At this she clung to him, laughing and crying in a sudden passion of fear.

“Hold me fast, Abel, and don’t let me go, whatever happens,” she said.

When he had parted from her at the fence which divided his land from Gay’s near the Poplar Spring, he watched her little figure climb the Haunt’s Walk and then disappear into the leafless shrubbery at the back of the house.  While he looked after her it seemed to him that the wan November day grew radiant with colour, and that spring blossomed suddenly, out of season, upon the landscape.  His hour was upon him when he turned and retraced his steps over the silver brook and up the gradual slope, where the sun shone on the bare soil and revealed each separate clod of earth as if it were seen under a microscope.  All nature was at one with him.  He felt the flowing of his blood so joyously that he wondered why the sap did not rise and mount upward in the trees.