“Thanks. The vision of one of them disturbs my dreams. One will be enough.”
Then followed six golden days on the banks of the Catawba. Every day he insisted with boyish enthusiasm on returning to that rock and seating her on her throne. He called her his queen, and worshipped at her feet.
He had the friendliest little chat with her mother, and told her how he loved her daughter and hoped for her approval. She answered with frankness that she was glad, and would love him as her own son, but that she disapproved of kissing and extravagant love-making until they were ready to be married, and their engagement duly announced.
So he could only hold Sallie’s hand and kiss the tips of her fingers and the little dimples where they joined the hand, and sometimes he would hold it against his own cheek while she smiled at him.
But when they rode homeward one evening he dared to put his arm behind her, high on the phaeton’s leather cushion, as they were going down a hill, and then lowered it a little as they started up the grade. She leaned back and found it there. At first she nestled against it very timidly and then trustingly. She looked into his face and both smiled.
“Isn’t that nice, Sallie?”
“Yes, it is,—I don’t think Mama would mind that, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, I never promised not to lean back in a phaeton, did I?”
“Certainly not, and it’s all right.”