"Are you willing?" asked the missionary, as he stood, hat off, before her after the introduction. He was a young man, clean-shaven, very different from her preconceived idea of his kind, and there was a little gleam of fun in his blue eyes.
"Well——" she hesitated and looked intently at the tip of her foot, peeping beyond the bottom of her skirt. A cricket in the cane burst out in a shrill laugh. She raised her head and plunged her eyes steadily into those of the amused inquisitioner.
"I'm always willing to do what Lad wishes," she said, placing her hand upon the Maestro's shoulder.
They moved beneath the shade of a bamboo thicket, and the missionary, standing before the boy and the girl, the bridle of his pony passed around his arm, read words out of a little book that he had taken from his saddlebag.
But before he had gone very far, the Maestro began to fumble at his jacket. With some difficulty he drew from some inward recess a little buckskin bag, and when the missionary, hesitating, stopped in the middle of a passage, the Maestro nodded his head encouragingly. "Go on; it's all right," he said, and he passed something that glittered upon the ring-finger of the girl.
"Whom God hath united let no man part," said the missionary. He closed his book, stepped forward, and kissed the girl on the forehead.
"That was well done," said the Maestro. And he also kissed the girl, but not on the forehead.
They stood together for a while, speaking in absent-minded tones, the missionary of his missions, the Maestro of his schools, and then the Maestro and the girl started on again toward Bago. But Huston did not mount right away. He stood looking at them as they walked along the road, side by side, as they were to be through life, the dog frisking gleefully at their heels. They came to a turn in the highway and with a sudden joyous skip they vanished behind the cane, hand in hand like children.
Huston rose slowly into his saddle. "Come on, little horse," he said kindly; "come on; we're not in this."