"I'm sorry. What more can one say? If I—"
"I thought I had done something to offend you," she said, standing very still, and looking far beyond him now, as though viewing their whole unhappy past. "And it's worried me even until this very day. I didn't do anything to offend you, did I, Gil?"
"You? You, Lucia?" he cried. "You couldn't do anything to offend me. Surely you must know that." He said it as a man says such things to the one woman he loves.
"It was only pride?" she was anxious to know again. "Because you were poor! Gil! Did you think so little of me as that?" There was a half-sob in her voice.
"I hoped to pick a fortune off a tree somewhere, and come back and surprise you with it. I was going to buy an automobile—one of those low ones as long as a Pullman car—and fill it with roses, and come dashing up to your front door and take you for a ride through the hills. It was to be autumn. I had even that fixed," he laughed. "Oh, I had everything thought out! And you were going to be so proud of me!... But I couldn't find a fortune-tree anywhere...." He looked away, embarrassed. He hadn't meant to tell her this.
"Gil!" she cried.
"I guess they don't grow any more. At least, not in this part of the country." He rose, a bit wearily, and walked over to the mantel-piece.
"What did you do, Gil?" she asked, her eyes following him.
"Well, I was a time-keeper on a railroad and weigh-boss in a coal mine. After that I punched cows until I got uncle to come here. Then the war started, and—that's all."