The knowledge of what she was to me, had come so gradually that I cannot remember when I first felt that my life-choice was made, and that the world held for me but one thing worth living for. I had been sure of it for many a long day, before I dreamed of putting the love I bore her into words. Nearly all my life it must have lain deep down in my heart, like a seed that, buried in the ground, waits for the coming of the spring; and now, in the spring and sunshine of my young manhood, it had risen up in blossom and in fruit.
'Willie, here comes your father,' said Hildred presently, jumping up and running off to meet him. They liked each other, those two. My father—it was no wonder certainly—had smiles and even words for her, such as he was never known to bestow on anyone else. Hildred was not a bit afraid of him, though other people said he became more 'dour' and hard as he got on in life. She came along by his side now, suiting her light footsteps to his heavy tread; he nodded now and then in answer to her merry chatter, and a look of slow contentment stole over his face. She made him stop for a moment to watch the wood-cutters, and as they stood looking on, the tree came crashing down at last.
Our idling time was over as soon as my father came. I turned away, and Hildred raised the bundle of sticks on to her head, and moved towards home.
'I haven't been losing much time,' she said, looking up at him merrily from under its shadow. 'Look, all these for Granny.'
'Good girl,' he answered, and he even stood still to watch her carrying it lightly in and out among the trees, and singing as she went.
Hildred never let the grass grow under her feet. She was always up and about. The bundle of sticks that pleased my father was only of a piece with all her sunny, helpful ways. She had gathered sticks for Granny hundreds of times before, only it was fated that this bundle should first put a thought into my father's head that he pondered over in his slow way all through the winter.
He told it to me one evening in the early spring, as we were going home from work together. I saw him looking round at me once or twice, as if there was something he had a mind to say, if he had known how to set about it.
'Grandmother's got to be an old woman,' he began at last, but after I had said 'yes,' he did not appear for some time to have anything to add.
'We need some one younger to keep the house,' he went on presently. 'I say, Will, do you ever think anything about getting married?'
I certainly did think of it very often indeed—a good deal oftener than I cared to tell my father. The question took me so by surprise that I scarcely knew how to answer it. At last I said bashfully, that 'perhaps I might, odd times.'