“It’s just being yourself, little girl,” he explained more gently. “The trouble with us is, we’ve thought too much about other people and––other things. It’s certain that after we’re married people aren’t going to worry much about us, so why should we let them worry us before that? No, it’s all our own affair. As for the salary part of it, we’ve been wrong about that, too. We don’t need so much as we thought we did. Why, do you know you can get a good lunch downtown for fifteen cents? It’s a fact. You can get an egg sandwich, a chocolate éclair, and a cup of coffee for that. I know the place. And I’ve figured that, with the house all furnished us, we can live easy on twenty-five a week until I get more. You don’t need your ten thousand a year. It’s a fact, Frances.”
She did not answer, because she did not quite know what he was talking about. Yet, her 234 blood was running faster. There was a new light in his eyes––a new quality in his voice that thrilled her. She had never heard a man talk like this before.
“You’ll have to trust me to prove all those things,” he was running on. “You’ll have to trust me, because I’ve learned a lot this summer. I’ve learned a lot about you that you don’t know yourself yet. So what I want you to do is just to take my hand and follow. Can you do that?”
At that moment it seemed that she could. On the voyage home she had sat much on the deck alone and looked at the stars, and there had been many moments when she felt exactly as she felt now. Thinking of him and looking at the stars, nothing else had seemed to matter but just the two of them.
There had been a child on board who had taken a great fancy to her––a child about the age of one that was now running about the grass under the watchful eyes of a nurse. His name was Peter, and she and Peter used to play tag together. One afternoon when he was very tired he had crept into her arms, and she had carried 235 him to her steamer-chair and wrapped him in her steamer-rug and held him while he slept. Then she had felt exactly as when she looked at the stars. All the things that ordinarily counted with her did not at that moment count at all. She had kissed the little head lying on her bosom and had thought of Don––her heart pounding as it pounded now.
“Oh, Don,” she exclaimed, “it’s only people in stories who do that way!”
“It’s the way we can do––if you will.”
“There’s Dad,” she reminded him.
“He let you become engaged, didn’t he?”
“Yes; but––you don’t know him as well as I.”