The strained lines around Esther Davidson's mouth relaxed for a second.
"Well, what in thunder am I going to do?" she joked heroically. But the effort at flippancy was evidently quite too much for her. In another instant her head pitched forward against the piazza railing and her voice, when she spoke again, was almost indistinguishable.
"And you knew all this an hour ago!" she accused him incoherently. "Knew my predicament—knew my inevitable weakness and fear and mortification—knew me a stranger among strangers. And yet you came up here to jolly me inconsequently—about a million foolish things!"
"It was because at the end of the hour I hoped to be something to you that would quite prevent your feeling a 'stranger among strangers,'" said Guthrie very quietly. "I have asked you to marry me this afternoon, you must remember."
The young woman's lip curled tremulously. "You astonish me!" she scoffed. "I had always understood that men did not marry very easily. Quick to love, slow to marry, is supposed to be your most striking characteristic—and here are you asking marriage of me, and you haven't even loved me yet!"
"You women do not seem to marry any too easily," smiled Guthrie gazing nervously from his open watch to the furthest corner of the corral, where the preacher's raw-boned pony, nose in air, was stubbornly refusing to take his bit.
"Indeed we do marry—perfectly easily—when we once love," retorted the woman contentiously! "It's the love part of it that we are reluctant about!"
"But I haven't asked you to love me," protested the man with much patience. "I merely asked you to marry me."
The woman's jaw dropped. "Out of sympathy for my emergency, out of mistaken chivalry, you're asking me to marry you, and not even pretending that you love me?" she asked in astonishment.
"I haven't had time to love you yet. I've only known you such a little while," said the man quite simply. Almost sternly he rose and began to pace up and down the narrow confines of the little piazza. "All I know is," he asserted, "that the very first moment you stepped off the train at Laramie, I knew you were the woman whom I was—going to love—sometime."