"I know it. I'm surer of that than if you were anyone else I've ever known in my life, Miss Garnet."
"It shall be as if I had never heard it."
"O no! I don't see how it can. In fact—well—I don't see why it should—unless you wish it so. Of course, in that case——"
"That's not a con-tin-gen-cy," said Barbara, and for more than a minute they listened to the clangorous racket of the rails. Then John asked her if it did not have a quality in it almost like music and she brightened up at him as she nodded.
He made a gesture toward the receding land, bent to her in the uproar and cried, "It scarcely seems a moment since those hills were full of spring color, and now they're blue in the distance!"
She looked at them tenderly and nodded again.
"At any rate," he cried, holding his hat on and bending lower, "we have Dixie for our common mother." His manner was patriotic.
She glanced up to him—the distance was trivial—beaming with sisterly confidence, and just then the train lurched, and—he caught her.
"H-I conscience! wa'n't it lucky I happened to have my arm back there just at that moment?"
Barbara did not say. She stood with her back against the car, gazing at the track, her small feet braced forward with new caution, but she saw March lapse into reverie and heave another sigh.