"I won't."
"Promise."
"I promise."
"Well," I began, "I——"
Nanty was looking at the sunset.
"I want to write, I must write," I went on more firmly, "because I am so—happy. It sounds silly, ridiculous, I know, and you won't understand, but——"
I paused. Nanty was still looking at the sunset. "You see, I was never very happy before I was married because of Peter—father, I mean. You have visited us often, so you know. You know how he worries poor mother. It was impossible to be happy. But now it is all so different, so wonderful, so tranquil, that I sometimes feel almost sick with happiness. It is too good to last, it cannot last. I am sometimes frightened. And I cannot let Dimbie know how I feel. Once you told me not to let the man I loved be too sure of it. The moment in which a man knows he has gained your love he ceases to value it."
"Did I say that?"
"Yes, you said that to me the day I was married. So what am I to do? I can't tell Amelia; I can't write it to mother, for Peter would sneer. I must have an outlet for my feelings, or they will overwhelm me. When I have sung and danced and rushed round the garden after Jumbles I can fly to my book. I can enter, 'Dimbie is a dear,' 'Dimbie is my husband, and he will be home in half an hour.' 'One Tree Cottage is the sweetest spot on earth, and I, Marguerite Westover, am the happiest girl in the world.' When the last half hour before his homecoming hangs heavily I can enter all the events of the day. It will pass the time. In the years to come, when I am an old, old woman, I can turn back the pages and read again of my first wonderful year. It will be a book only for myself, only for my eyes. That which Dimbie could not understand I can put between its covers. A man, I imagine, cannot always understand the way a woman feels about things that touch her deeply, like—well, like when Dimbie and I say our prayers together. And the song of a bird, a thrush woke us the other morning. It was perched on a bough in a shaft of warm sunlight, and was pouring out its little heart just as though it were breaking with happiness. My eyes were full of tears, and Dimbie saw them. He said—well, he didn't understand. He thought I was sad, and I couldn't explain even to him that my tears were of joy. And Amelia—she looks at me so when six o'clock comes and I cannot keep my feet still. I brush up the hearth and put Dimbie's slippers to warm, and cut the magazines, and place our two chairs side by side, very close together, and put a daffodil in my hair, and go to the window, and wander to the kitchen, and go to the front door, and back to the kitchen to see how the meat is doing, and——"
I broke off, for Nanty had held up her hands for me to cease, and when she turned to me her eyes were full of tears.