“I will forgive you.”
“He's lucky, because if I didn't know you were promised and in love, I'd go down at your feet and beg you to marry me. You're the wife for a Yankee sailor, Polly Candage. If only there were two of you in this world, we'd have a double wedding.”
He leaped up and started away.
“Where are you going?” she asked, and there was almost a wail in her tones. “No, he does not understand girls well,” she told herself, bitterly.
“I'm going down to Rowley's store to see if he will take his money back and let us save interest. He told me I'd have to keep the money for a year.”
She called to him falteringly, but with such appeal in her tones that he halted and stared at her.
“Couldn't you—Isn't it just as well to let the matter rest until—till—”
“Oh, there's no time like the present in money matters,” he declared, with a laugh, wholly oblivious, not in the least understanding her embarrassment, her piteous effort to bar her little temple of love's sacrifice so that he could not trample in just then.
His laugh was a forced one. He realized that if he did not hurry away from this girl he would be reaching out his arms to her, declaring the love that surged in him, now that he had awakened to full consciousness of that love; his Yankee reticence, his instinct of honor between men, were fighting hard against his passion; he told himself that he would not betray a man he did not know, nor proffer love to a girl who, so he believed, loved another.
“May I not go with you?” she pleaded, restraining her wild impulse to run ahead of him and warn the deacon.