Then, almost in the same breath, all the facetious accusation left her face. Even the warm glow of wonder which had lighted her wet eyes gave way to a new seriousness.

"No one has ever told me," she stated slowly, "but I know it is so, just the same. Somehow, because it was to be the first party I had ever attended--or--or had a chance to attend, I thought it must be all right, just once, for you to buy me these. There was no one else to buy them, Denny, and maybe I wanted to go so very much I made myself believe that it was all right. But there isn't any party now--for us.

And--and men don't buy clothes for women, Denny--not until they're married!"

Her face was tensely earnest while she waited for the big man before her to answer. And Young Denny turned his head, staring silently out of the opposite window down toward the village, dark now, in the valley below. He cleared his throat uncertainly.

"Do they?" She was leaning forward until her hair brushed his own. "Do they, Denny?" A rising inflection left the words hanging in midair.

"I don't know just what the difference is," he began finally, his voice very deliberate. "I've often tried to figure it out, and never been quite able to get it straight"--he nodded his head again toward the sleeping village--"but we--we've never been like the rest, anyhow.

And--and anyway," he reached out one hand and laid it upon her knees, "we're to be married, too--when--when----"

With swift, caressing haste she lifted the slippers that lay cradled in her lap and set them back inside the open package. Lightly she swung herself down and stood before him, both hands balanced upon his shoulders. For just the fraction of a moment her eyes lifted over his head, flickering toward the stone demijohn that stood in the far, shadowy corner near the door. Her voice was trembling a little when she went on.

"Then let me come soon, Denny," she begged. "Can't it be soon? Oh, I'm going to keep them!" One hand searched behind her to fall lightly upon the package upon the table. "They're--they're so beautiful that I don't believe I could ever give them back. But do we have to wait any longer--do we? I can take care of him, too."

Vehemently she tilted her head toward the little drab cottage across under the opposite hill.

"He hardly ever notices when I come or go. I--I want to come, Denny.

I'm lonesome, and--and--" her eyes darkened and swam with fear as she stared beyond him into the dusky corner near the door, "why can't I come now, before some time--when it might be--too late?"

He reached up and took her hands from his shoulders and held them in front of him, absently contemplating their rounded smoothness. She bent closer, trying to read his eyes, and found them inscrutable. Then his fingers tightened.

"And be like them?" he demanded, and the words leaped out so abruptly that they were almost harsh. "And be like all the rest," he reiterated, jerking his head backward, "old and thin, and bent and worn-out at thirty?" A hard, self-scathing note crept into the words.

"Why, it--it took me almost a month--even to buy these!"

He in turn reached out and laid a hand upon the bundle behind her. But she only laughed straight back into his face--a short, unsteady laugh of utter derision.

"Old?" she echoed. "Work! But I--I'd have you, Denny, wouldn't I?"

Again she laughed in soft disdain. "Clothes!" she scoffed. And then, more serious even than before: "Denny, is--is that the only reason, now?"

The gleam that always smoldered in Denny Bolton's eyes whenever he remembered the tales they told around the Tavern stove of Old Denny's last bad night began to kindle. His lips were thin and straight and as colorless as his suddenly weary face as he stood and looked back at her. She lifted her hands and put them back upon his shoulders.

"I'm not afraid--any more--to chance it," she told him, her lips trembling in spite of all she could do to hold them steady. "I'm never afraid, when I'm with you. It--it's only when I'm alone that it grows to be more than I can bear, sometimes. I'm not afraid. Does it--does it have to stay there any longer, in the corner, Denny? Aren't we sure enough now--you and I--aren't we?"

He stopped back a pace--his big body huge above her slenderness--stepped away from the very nearness of her. But as she lifted her arms to him he began to shake his head--the old stubborn refusal that had answered her a countless number of times before.

"Aren't we?" she said again, but her voice sounded very small and bodiless and forlorn in the half dark room.

He swung one arm in a stiff gesture that embraced the entire valley.

"They're all sure, too," his voice grated hoa.r.s.ely, "They're all sure, too--just as sure as we could ever be--and there's a whole town of them!"

She was bending silently over the table, retying the bundle, when he crossed back to her side, a lighted lantern dangling in one hand.

"I don't know why myself," he tried to explain. "I only know I've got to wait. And I don't even know what I'm waiting for--but I know it's got to come!"

She would not lift her head when he slipped his free arm about her shoulders and drew her against him. When he reached out to take the package from her she held it away from him, but her voice, half m.u.f.fled against his checkered coat, was anything but hard.

"Let _you_ carry them?" she murmured. "Why--I wouldn't trust them to any other hands in the world but my own. You can't even see them again--not until I've finished them, and I wear them--for you."

With head still bowed she walked before him to the open door. But there on the threshold she stopped and flashed up at him her whimsically provocating smile.

"Tell me--why don't you tell me, Denny," she commanded imperiously, "that I'm prettier than all the others--even if I haven't the pretty clothes!"

When the ridges to the east were tinged with the red of a rising sun, Denny Bolton was still sitting, head propped in his hands, at the table before the window, totally oblivious to the smoking lamp beside him, or to anything else save the square card which he had found lying there beneath the table after he had taken her back across the valley to John Anderson's once-white cottage. He rose and extinguished the smoking wick as the first light of day began to creep through the room.

"---- requests the pleasure of Miss Dryad Anderson's company," he repeated aloud. And then, as he turned to the open door and the work that was waiting for him, in a voice that even he himself had never before heard pa.s.s his lips:

"And she could have gone--she could have, and she didn't--just because----"

His grave voice drifted off into silence. As if it were a perishably precious thing, he slipped the square card within its envelope and b.u.t.toned the whole within his coat.

CHAPTER V

As far back as he could remember Denny could not recall a single day when Old Jerry had swung up the long hill road that led to his lonesome farmhouse on the ridge at a pace any faster than a crawling walk. Nor could he recollect, either, a single instance when he had chanced to arrive at that last stop upon the route much before dark.

And yet it was still a good two hours before sundown; only a few minutes before he had driven his heavy steaming team in from the fields and turned toward the ladder that mounted to the hayloft, when the familiar shrill complaint of ungreased axles drifted up to him from the valley.

With a foot upon the first rung Young Denny paused, scowling in mild perplexity. He had crossed the next moment to the open double doors, as the sound floated up to him in a steadily increasing volume, and was standing, his big body huge in its flannel shirt, open at the throat, and high boots laced to the knees, leaning loosely at ease against the door frame, when the dingy rig with its curtains flapping crazily in the wind lurched around the bend in the road and came bouncing wildly up the rutty grade.

The boy straightened and stiffened, his head going forward a little, for the fat old mare was pounding along at a lumbering gallop--a pace which, in all the time he had watched for it, he had never before beheld. Old Jerry was driving with a magnificent abandon, his hands far outstretched over the dash, and more than that, for even from where he stood Denny could hear him shouting at her in his thin, cracked falsetto--shouting for still more speed.

A rare, amused smile tugged at the corners of Young Denny's lips as he crossed the open yard to the crest of the hill. But when the groaning buggy came to a standstill and Old Jerry flung the reins across the mare's wide back, to dive and burrow in frantic haste under the seat for the customary roll of advertis.e.m.e.nts, without so much as a glance for the boy who strode slowly up to the wheel, that shadow of a smile which had touched his face faded into concerned gravity. He hesitated a moment, as if not quite certain of what he should do.

"Is there--there isn't any one sick, is there?" he asked at last, half diffidently.

The little, white-haired old man in the buggy jerked erect with startling, automatonlike swiftness at that slow question. For a moment he stood absolutely motionless, his back toward the speaker, his head perked far over to one side as though he refused to believe he had heard correctly. Then, little by little, he wheeled until his strangely brilliant, birdlike eyes were staring straight down into Denny's upturned, anxious face. And as he stared Old Jerry's countenance grew blankly incredulous.

"Sick!" he echoed the boy's words scornfully. "Sick!"

His grotesquely thin body seemed to swell as he straightened himself, and his shrill squeak of a voice took on a new note of pompous importance.

"I guess," he stated impressively, "I reckon, Denny, you ain't heard the news, hev you?" He chuckled pityingly, half contemptuously. "I reckon you couldn't've," he concluded with utter finality.

The old, sullenly bewildered light crept back into Young Denny's gray eyes. He shifted his feet uneasily, shaking his head.

"I--I just got back down from the timber, three days ago," he explained, and somehow, entirely unintentionally, as he spoke the slow statement seemed almost an apology for his lack of information. "I guess I haven't heard much of anything lately--up here. Is it--is it something big?"

Old Jerry hesitated. He felt suddenly the hopeless, overwhelming dearth of words against which he labored in the attempt to carry the tidings worthily.

"Big!" He repeated the other's question. "Big! Why, G.o.dfrey 'Lisha, boy, it's the biggest thing that's ever happened to this town.

It--it's terrific! We'll be famous--that's what we'll be! In a week or two Boltonwood'll be as famous as--as--why, we'll be as famous as the Chicago Fair!"

He broke off with a gasp for breath and started fluttering madly through the paper which he had wrenched from Young Denny's bundle of closely wrapped mail, until he found the page he sought.