“God bless you, Little Ann,” he said. “I just knew I should find you here. I'd have bet my last dollar on it.”
The hands he held were trembling just a little, and the dimples quivered in and out. But her eyes were steady, and a lovely increasing intensity glowed in them.
“You went after him and brought him back. He was all wrought up, and he needed some one with good common sense to stop him in time to make him think straight before he did anything silly,” she said.
“I says to him,” T. Tembarom made the matter clear; “`Say, you've left something behind that belongs to you! Comeback and get it.' I meant Lady Joan. And I says, `Good Lord, man, you're acting like a fellow in a play. That place doesn't belong to me. It belongs to you. If it was mine, fair and square, Little Willie'd hang on to it. There'd be no noble sacrifice in his. You get a brace on.'”
“When they were talking in that silly way about you, and saying you'd run away,” said Little Ann, her face uplifted adoringly as she talked, “I said to father, `If he's gone, he's gone to get something. And he'll be likely to bring it back.'”
He almost dropped her hands and caught her to him then. But he saved himself in time.
“Now this great change has come,” he said, “everything will be different. The men you'll know will look like the pictures in the advertisements at the backs of magazines—those fellows with chins and smooth hair. I shall look like a chauffeur among them.”
But she did not blench in the least, though she remembered whose words he was quoting. The intense and lovely femininity in her eyes only increased. She came closer to him, and so because of his height had to look up more.
“You will always make jokes—but I don't care. I don't care for anything but you,” she said. “I love your jokes; I love everything about you: I love your eyes—and your voice—and your laugh. I love your very clothes.” Her voice quivered as her dimples did. “These last months I've sometimes felt as if I should die of loving you.”
It was a wonderful thing—wonderful. His eyes—his whole young being had kindled as he looked down drinking in every word.