“All right,” Sally promised recklessly, her cheeks pink with excitement, her eyes soft and velvety, like dark blue pansies.
Sally was eager as a child, when she joined David Nash in that part of the lane that skirted the orchard. Although it was nearly nine o’clock it was not yet dark; the sweet, throbbing peace of a June twilight, disturbed only by a faint breeze that whispered through the leaves of the fruit trees, brooded over the farm.
“I hurried—as fast—as I could!” she gasped. “Grandma Carson ripped up this dress for me this afternoon and while you and I were washing dishes Mrs. Carson stitched up the seams. Wasn’t that sweet of her? Do you like it, David? It was awful dirty and I washed it in gasoline this afternoon, while I was doing Pearl’s things.”
She backed away from him, took the full skirt of the made-over dress between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and made him a curtsey.
“You look like a picture in it,” David told her gravely. “When I saw Pearl busting out of it I had no idea it was such a pretty dress.”
“I couldn’t have kept it on tonight if Pearl hadn’t already left for the party at Willis’s. Was she terribly mad at you because you wouldn’t go?”
David shrugged his broad shoulders, but there was a twinkle in his eyes. “Let’s talk about something pleasant. Want a peach, Sally?”
And Sally ate the peach he gave her, though she had peeled so many for canning those last few days that she had thought she never wanted to see another peach. But this was a special peach, for David had chosen it for her, had touched it with his own hands.
They walked slowly down the fruit-scented lane together, Sally’s shoulder sometimes touching David’s coatsleeve, her short legs striving to keep step with his long ones.
She listened, or appeared to listen, drugged with content, her fatigue and the smarting of her gasoline-reddened hands completely forgotten.