“Thank you,” she said, gently. “That wouldn’t be nice, would it,—never to see you again after that? No. I’m—what was it you said?—I’m standing by.”
He sat down again, disappointed.
“I must tell you what happened,” she said. “I broke out and went to a party in town. That isn’t allowed. I expected a scene when I got home. It might have been very disagreeable for the—for my escort, you know. So, having first run away to go to the party, I next ran away from the party and started home alone. You know the rest.”
“Oh,” said Thane, thoughtfully.
A sudden constraint fell upon them. Their eyes did not meet again.
They were sitting in silence, she in reverie, when a sound of commotion was heard in the hallway. The carriage had returned. Double footsteps approached.
The door opened, admitting Enoch, and with him the Presbyterian minister, a clean, tame, ox-like man with a very large bald head, no eyebrows and round blue eyes. Enoch closed the door. Thane stood up. The minister looked first at him and then at Agnes. Her eyes were full of wonder, tinged with premonition. Enoch spoke.
“We found her in the grass. That’s the man. Marry them.”
The minister, regarding both of them at once in an oblique manner, began to nod his head up and down as if saying to himself, “Oh-ho! So this is what we find?”
Thane was slow to understand Enoch’s words. He had the look of a man in the act of doubting his familiar senses.