“If you will, dear,” he said. “Will you?”
“I will,—if I can, if I can make it seem right to after I’ve thought it all out.—Oh! Peter, I love you. I love you.”
“I had no idea of that,” he said gravely, “but 233 it’s wonderful that you do. I’ll put everything I’ve got into trying to make you happy, Beulah.”
“I know you will, Peter.” Her arms closed around his neck and tightened there. “I love you.”
He made her comfortable and she relaxed like a tired child, almost asleep under his soothing hand, and the quiet spell of his tenderness.
“I didn’t know it could be like this,” she whispered.
“But it can,” he answered her.
In his heart he was saying, “This is best. I am sure this is best. It is the right and normal way for her—and for me.”
In her tri-cornered dormitory room at the new school which she was not sharing with any one this year Eleanor, enveloped in a big brown and yellow wadded bathrobe, was writing a letter to Peter. Her hair hung in two golden brown braids over her shoulders and her pure profile was bent intently over the paper. At the moment when Beulah made her confession of love and closed her eyes against the breast of the man who had just asked her to marry him, two big tears forced their way between Eleanor’s lids and splashed down upon her letter.