"What is it? What has happened?" he said. "Has the child been temperish and vexed you, or did she pull your ribbons awry in play?"
"No, she was lovely, far too lovable;" then she paused to look over the neat picket-fence into one of the many gardens that filled the spaces between street and white-pillared porches, where tufts of golden daffodils shone like prisoned sunbeams on the lawn and single white violets, short stemmed and fragrant, huddled timidly about the roots of leafless rose-bushes in the long borders. "What has happened is that in this last hour I've been away, Willy," she said, as she made a wide-sweeping gesture, "so far away from you and Elizabeth that I almost forgot how you looked. So far that I saw quite back to things that might have been."
Emeline Felton had always been, within fixed boundaries, of a romantic and emotional disposition, but with that gesture, suggestive of the breaking of bonds, Esterbrook felt that she swept these boundaries aside.
"Was I other than I am now in those far-away days? Have I not always been the same to you? Do I not always study your interests?" Esterbrook said, again meeting her eyes that did not turn away.
"Yes, but you were different once, though not for long; since then, as you say, you've been always the same, and that's part of the matter."
"I wish that in those other days I'd had the courage to go away far enough to see if you would miss me and then haunt you until I'd made you marry me, Emeline."
"And I—I wish you had!"
Esterbrook caught his breath: "Is it too late? Am I too old to change the might have been?"
"Ah, yes; if I married, after to-day, it must be a younger man than you. Besides you could not stand the shock of telling Elizabeth, and if I told her, she might send me to bed without my supper!
"Then at our age we must consider our obligations to society; as Elizabeth puts it, how disappointed it would be if the institution known as the Misses Felton and Mr. Esterbrook should disintegrate! How we should be missed, we nice safe people! Ah, no, Willy, don't look so serious; it's only some left-over mad March Hare that has bewitched me," and Miss Emmy laughed with the same ripple in her voice as that of the bluebird on the roof of its box in the garden.