"I dare say I shall have to serve seven years before I can get your father's consent. She will be older then. I was listening to a romantic story about an old house where a handsome girl leaned out of a window and her beauty attracted an English officer passing by, who said to himself that was the one woman for him, and long afterward he went back, found her, and married her."
"A handsome Miss Sheafe. Yes." Cary smiled.
"See here, Cary Adams." Hawthorne took a small leather case out of his pocket. Between two cards was a pressed rose. "When I took your packet to Miss Doris Adams almost four years ago, I gave it into the hands of the sweetest little girl I ever saw. If I had been less of a gentleman I must have kissed her. I espied one rose in the garden and asked her for it. This is the rose she gave me. I meant to come North and find her, and when I asked for leave of absence to visit Boston this business was put in my charge. Then I said, 'I will look up the little girl, who must be a large girl now, and woo her with the sincerest regard.' It shall go hard indeed with me if I cannot win her. But I have fancied of late that you——"
"She is very dear to me and to my father. But I had not thought——"
"Then I take my chances. As I said, I will wait for her. She is still very young, and I should feel conscience-smitten to rob your father. Sometime you may want to bring the woman you love to the old home, and then it will not be so hard. I could keep true to her the whole world over; and if she promises, she will keep true to me."
Cary Adams was deeply moved. Such devotion ought to win a reward. How blind he and his father had been, thinking of Betty Leverett.
Oh, how could they let Doris go! Yet a lover like this was not to be curtly refused.
"I shall not stand in your way," quietly.
"Thank you a thousand times. But if she had been for you, as I feared, I should have proved man enough to keep silent and go my way. It has been a happy summer, and in two weeks more it will end. Still, I may be able to get an appointment here. I shall try for it and return."
"Come," said Cary Adams, and he went out feeling there had been a great change in the world, and he was wrapped about with some mysterious influence.