"I came after that fan, and I've twisted my foot over again."
He restored the fan, and then seated himself at her feet on the lowest step.
"It is fortunate I took this way home," he said coolly. "I hear that you think I am miserly."
"What?" she exclaimed in surprise.
"I am told that you pronounce me miserly," he repeated. "I am very sorry, for I mean to ask you to be my wife."
Instead of answering this strange declaration, Patty covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. He laid his fingers lightly upon her hair, smoothing it with a caressing motion. Surprise, physical pain, anger, and love were all oddly mingled in Patty's mind. She knew that she loved this man, and she was bitterly angry with herself for having misjudged him. She was no less angry with him for knowing the latter fact, of which Emily Purdy had taken care that he should not remain ignorant. She had, too, that Amazonian repugnance to the caress of a lover which is often inborn in strong personalities. She shook off the lawyer's touch as if it were fire.
"I misjudged you," she said, by an angry effort controlling her tears, "and I am not too proud to own it. Now forget it."
"Very well," he said, "it is forgotten. But your opinion is every thing to me, for I have loved you these dozen years, Patty. I've watched you growing up, and loved you more and more every year. I've had the words in my mouth a hundred times; but now I am able to marry, and I ask you to be my wife."
However cool these words may seem in black and white, they were intense as Tom Putnam spoke them, his rich voice gathering force as he proceeded. He was moved from that calm which Flossy Plant declared to be an essential law of his existence. The passion he felt was too old, too well defined, to come stammering and broken from his tongue; but his voice trembled, and he bent forward until his hot breath touched her cheek. He did not again attempt to caress her, but she felt that his eyes were fixed upon her with a keenness that could almost pierce the darkness. Still her mood was a defensive one. That she fought against herself no less than against him, only added strength to her determination not to yield.
"You had little faith in the depth of my love," she said at last, after a silence which seemed to both very long, "if you thought I should be afraid of poverty with you."