“And why didn’t you come?”

“How little you know about girls?  Of course I had to go with the one I—­I—­I—­; well with the one I did not love down to the very soles of his feet” And then there was the journey with the parrot.  “I rather liked the bird.  I don’t know that you said very much, but I think you would have said less if there had been no bird.”

“In fact I have been a fool all along.”

“You weren’t a fool when you took me out through the orchard and caught me when I jumped over the wall.  Do you remember when you asked me, all of a sudden, whether I should like to be your wife?  You weren’t a fool then.”

“But you knew what was coming.”

“Not a bit of it.  I knew it wasn’t coming.  I had quite made up my mind about that.  I was as sure of it;—­oh, as sure of it as I am that I’ve got you now.  And then it came;—­like a great thunderclap.”

“A thunderclap, Mary!”

“Well;—­yes.  I wasn’t quite sure at first.  You might have been laughing at me;—­mightn’t you?”

“Just the kind of joke for me!”

“How was I to understand it all in a moment?  And you made me repeat all those words.  I believed it then, or I shouldn’t have said them.  I knew that must be serious.”  And so she deified him, and sat at his feet looking up into his eyes, and fooled him for a while into the most perfect happiness that a man ever knows in this world.  But she was not altogether happy herself till she had got Larry to come to her at the house at Bragton and swear to her that he would be her friend.

THE END