"I think Mr. Chambers knows what he wants to do."
"Yes, but he ought to know better than to keep bothering a girl that doesn't."
Elizabeth and Peggy managed to eat a plate of ice-cream apiece in spite of their dejection, but Elizabeth steadfastly refused to break Mr. Chambers' five-dollar bill, even to pay for the five pounds of candy she purchased for him.
"He can pay me the way he would a grown-up person," she said. "I prefer to buy our own ice-cream, and do his errands on a strictly business basis."
"My goodness," Peggy said, "I feel as if we had suffered enough, without having to buy our own refreshments."
They rode with the chauffeur only a part of the way home, because when they had travelled twenty miles of the forty between the tip and the elbow of the crooked right arm of Massachusetts a tire gave way and they all stepped out of the car and took a walk in the woods while they were waiting for repairs to be made.
Mr. Chambers and Ruth slipped into a thread of a path going in the opposite direction from that taken by the two girls, but evidently made a detour and turned again toward them, for the moment in silence. When they heard the sound of voices just beyond Peggy put her finger to her lips.
"I am the kind of man who always gets what he wants," Mr. Chambers was saying. "You won't give me the chance to tell you what I want, but you know pretty well what it is, and I think you know that I am going to get it."
"No," said Ruth Farraday.
"You know that I want you to marry me?"