He strode up the path and she rose to meet him. She remembered now that she had many things to tell him, and the knowledge of them choked her.
"Newell," she began, "you mustn't go—I don't know where you're goin'—but down that way, you mustn't go till eight o'clock. An' then I guess you'll see her. It'll be better than the house, because her mother's there. Why," her voice faltered and she ended breathlessly, "what makes you look so?"
He looked like wrath. It was upon his knotted brow, the iron lips, and in the blazing of his eyes.
"What's this I've been told?" he said, in a voice she had never heard from him, "about Clayton Rand?"
She laughed, relieved and pleased at her own cleverness.
"It's all right, Newell," she called gleefully. "He hasn't been there for two weeks. He's comin' to-night to take me to ride, an' I'll make him go the turnpike road, an' she'll be down by Pine Hollow, an' you can snap her up under her mother's nose—an' she's got on her blue."
Newell put out his hands and grasped her wrists. He held them tight and looked at her. She gazed back in wonder. In all the months of his repining she had not seen him so, full of warm passion, of a steady purpose.
"Dorcas," he said, "I won't have it!"
She answered in pure wonder and with great simplicity:—
"What, Newell? What won't you have?"