“I hope you do. I—I love you, Edith.” He wondered if the words rang true. To him they sounded hollow and forced. But Miss Garwood’s waist yielded a little more. The fingers of her disengaged hand clasped the lapel of his coat and played with it, and her sweet blue eyes looked up pleadingly, trustfully, into his brown ones.
“Joe,” she murmured, “I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure, but I half suspect that I—I—oh!”
The exclamation was smothered, for again the natural thing had happened.
Five minutes afterward Miss Garwood smoothed her hair and said irrelevantly:
“But we haven’t found my ring!”
“Good old ring,” said Joe, producing it from his pocket.
“Joe!” she cried in unaffected astonishment. “Did you have it there all the time?”
“I found it pretty early in the game,” he acknowledged without shame. “I’ll buy you another to-morrow.”
The dim light hid the sudden gravity of her features. “Do you mean an engagement ring, Joe?”
“Of course.”