For a moment Betty kept silent, gazing into the kindly face, and then the instinct of match-making asserted itself too strongly to be resisted.
“There’s no sense in your being a lonesome widower. Why don’t you get married? I mean it.”
For a moment Jonathan was too astounded at the audacity of the serious suggestion to reply; but when he recovered his breath he exclaimed:
“Well, I swan to man! What will you ask me to be doin’ next?”
“Oh, I mean it, all right,” persisted Mrs. Betty. “Here you’ve got a nice home for a wife, and I tell you you need the happiness of a real home. You will live a whole lot longer if you have somebody to love and look after; and if you want to know what you will be asking me to do next, I will wager a box of candy it will be to come to your wedding.”
“Make it cigars, Mrs. Betty; I’m not much on candy. Maybe you’re up to tellin’ me who’ll have me. I haven’t noticed any females makin’ advances towards me in some time now. The only woman I see every day is Mary McGuire, and she’d make a pan-cake griddle have the blues if she looked at it.” 143
Mrs. Betty grasped her elbow with one hand, and putting the first finger of the other hand along the side of her little nose, whispered:
“What’s the matter with Mrs. Burke?”
Jonathan deliberately pulled a hair from his small remaining crop and cut it with the scythe, as if he had not heard Betty’s impertinent suggestion. But finally he replied:
“There’s nothin’ the matter with Mrs. Burke that I know of; but that’s no reason why she should be wantin’ to marry me.”