Marriage! The word made her feel shivery and solemn and more than a little frightened, but when a shudder of fear made her hand twitch in David’s, the firm, warm pressure of his fingers reassured her. She resolutely forced her mind away from the mysteries that lay ahead of her, mysteries at which Mrs. Stone had hinted in that last, embarrassing lecture she had delivered to a cowering, shamefaced Sally the day Clem Carson had taken her to the farm. Whatever lay before her, David would be with her, gentle, sweet, infinitely tender—
“I’ll be Mrs. David Nash,” she told herself childishly. “I’ll be David’s wife. I’ll have David for my family, and maybe—some day—there’ll be a baby David, with hair like gold in the sun—”
“You’ll have to tell a fib about your age, honey,” David interrupted her thoughts, his voice grave and, it seemed to her, a little embarrassed. Maybe David, too, was frightened a bit, just as she was! That made it easier. She was suddenly jubilantly glad that he was not wise and sophisticated and very much older than she, like Arthur Van Horne, for instance.
“I’ll have to say I’m eighteen, won’t I?” she laughed. “Do I look eighteen, David? Now that most girls have bobbed hair, my long hair, ought to make me look very old and dignified. I do look eighteen, don’t I, David?”
“Oh, Sally!” David stopped abruptly and held her close to him, pityingly. “You look the adorable baby that you are! I pray to God that marrying me won’t make you old before your time! Why, honey-child, you haven’t had any girlhood at all, or childhood either! You should have dozens of sweethearts before you marry—go to theaters and parties and dances for years and years yet, before you settle down.”
“Then I shan’t settle down,” Sally laughed shakily. “I’ll be a giddy flapper, if you’d rather! Ah, no, David! I want to be a good wife to you! But we won’t get old and serious. We’ll work together and play together and study together and hobo all over the country together when we feel like it. I think we make good hoboes, don’t you?”
“Not at this rate,” David laughed, relieved. “I’m not going to kiss you a single other time before dawn, or we’ll never get anywhere. And don’t you try to vamp me, you little witch!”
He did not quite keep his promise, for when Sally became so tired about four o’clock in the morning that she could walk no further, he picked her up in his big-muscled young arms, and strode proudly into the dawn with her, and of course the best antidote for fatigue and sleepiness was an occasional kiss on her drooping eyelids or upon her babyishly lax, pink little mouth.
When the sun came up they were a little shy with each other, inclined to talk rapidly about trivial things.
“Canfield—two miles,” David read from a sign post at a cross-roads. “I’m going to ask that truck driver the name of the nearest county seat, and how to get there.”