"There's nothin' the matter," she answered. "Only you mustn't—yet."
A shade of relief passed over his face, and he smiled.
"There, there!" he said, "never you mind. I understand. But if I come over the last of the week, I guess it will be different. Won't it be different, Milly?"
"Yes," she owned, with a little sob in her throat, "it will be different."
Thrown out of his niche of easy friendliness with circumstance, he stood there in irritated consciousness that here was some subtile barrier which he had not foreseen. Ever since John Porter's death, there had been strengthening in him a joyous sense that Milly's life and his own must have been running parallel all this time, and that it needed only a little widening of channels to make them join. His was no crass certainty of finding her ready to drop into his hand; it was rather a childlike, warm-hearted faith in the permanence of her affection for him, and perhaps, too, a shrewd estimate of his own lingering youth compared with John Porter's furrowed face and his fifty-five years. But now, with this new whiffling of the wind, he could only stand rebuffed and recognize his own perplexity.
"You do care, don't you, Milly?" he asked, with a boy's frank ardor. "You want me to come again?"
All her own delight in youth and the warm naturalness of life had rushed back upon her.
"Yes," she answered eagerly. "I'll tell you the truth. I always did tell you the truth. I do want you to come."
"But you don't want me to-night!" He lifted his brows, pursing his lips whimsically; and Amelia laughed.
"No," said she, with a little defiant movement of her own crisp head, "I don't know as I do want you to-night!"