"Of course I do." Sudden color filled his face. "You used to put your apple there. Every time I came for it my heart nearly jumped in the hole you hid it in, I was so afraid I'd be seen and would have to stop coming. I never ate one of those apples. I couldn't."
"I don't see why you didn't. They were awfully nice apples. I loved them."
"I know you did." He looked straight ahead. "That's why I couldn't eat yours. It used to make me so fighting furious to think—to think things were like they were that every night I'd throw rocks at the brick wall in front of the house for half an hour before I went home. Did you know the first time I ever saw you you were hanging over that wall? It was on a Sunday afternoon and I asked the boy with me what was your name. From that Sunday to the week you went away I never missed going to Sunday-school. Mother couldn't understand it. She didn't know you were compelled to be there. That's the one bit of system I approved of in your institution.
"I don't remember whether it was on the next Sunday after I saw you looking over the wall that I made up my mind I was going to marry you, or the Sunday after, but it was one or the other. That was over ten years ago, and—"
"We ought to be home this minute." She started down the half-dark street. "I'm not going to listen to things like that. Besides, it's after supper-time and Hedwig will be tired of waiting. You walk so slow, John!"
"All right." He joined her and together they turned into the Calverton road, up which at the top of the hill was the home now her own. "If you don't want to hear me I'll wait until later." He smiled in the half-knowing face. "You are tired, aren't you, of my asking when you are going to marry me? I'm perfectly willing to stop, but not until you tell me."
"Do you think I'd marry anybody for years and /years/ and YEARS?" She rolled the "years" out with increasing emphasis on each. "I have just begun to really live here—to start some things; to get used to having a home of my own; to knowing all the people. And then" —she looked in his face, indignant protest in her eyes—"there's Miss Gibbie. Do you think I would go away and leave her like this?"
"It is asking a good deal, I know." Out of his voice had dropped all lightness and in it were quiet purpose and gravity. "And in asking it I may seem selfish, yet I do ask it. For ten years I have had but one thought, one hope, one dream, if you will. It took me through college that I might please you; made me settle down to work at once when through with study; made me hold all my property interests here because I know you loved the place. But not until two years ago did I ask you to marry me."
"What did you ask me for then?" she interrupted, pulling a branch of a mock-orange bush on the side of the road and stripping it of its leaves. "We are such good friends, John, you and I. We have always been, and I don't want you to marry anybody—not even me." She turned to him, but she did not hear his quick, indrawing breath. "I need you too much, John. You always know the things I don't, and you unravel all the knots and straighten all the twisted strings when I get mixed up, but if we got married it wouldn't be the same at all."
"Why wouldn't it?"