"It's come to this!" he burst out, "that I can't stand it another week without losing my senses. I've thought till I'm distracted. Blossom, will you marry me?"
"O Mr. Jonathan!" she gasped while her breast fluttered like a bird's.
"Not openly, of course—there's my mother to think of—but I'll take you to Washington—we'll find a way somehow. Can't you arrange to go to Applegate for a day or two, or let your people think you have?"
"I can—yes—" she responded in the same troubled tone. "I've a school friend living there, and I sometimes spend several days with her."
"Then go on Saturday—no, let's see—this is Tuesday. Can you go on
Friday, darling?"
"Perhaps. I can't tell—I think so—I must see."
As he drew her forward, she bent toward him, still softly, still humbly, and an instant later, his arms were about her and his lips pressed hers.
CHAPTER XII
THE DREAM AND THE REAL
The following Friday Abel drove Blossom in his gig to the house of her school friend in Applegate, where she was to remain for a week. On his way home he stopped at the store for a bottle of harness oil, and catching the red glow of the fire beyond the threshold of the public room, he went in for a moment to ask old Adam Doolittle about a supply of hominy meal he had ready for him at the mill. As the ancient man crouched over the fire, with his bent hands outstretched and his few silvery hairs rising in the warmth, his profile showed with the exaggeration of a twelfth century grotesque, the features so distorted by the quivering shadows that his beaked nose appeared to rest in the crescent-shaped silhouette of his chin. His mouth was open, and from time to time he shook his head and muttered to himself in an undertone—a habit he had fallen into during the monotonous stretches of Mr. Mullen's sermons. Across from him sat Jim Halloween, and in the middle of the hearth, Solomon Hatch stood wiping the frost from his face with a red cotton handkerchief.