“Leigh!”
“Tell me why you insist when by all the rules you are due to snake the prettiest girl in the crowd off the wagon and into your buggy. Why aren’t you satisfied to make the other boys all envy you?” Leigh had risen and stood beside the rustic seat, her arm across its high back.
“Because it is the last time. Because we’ve known each other since childhood and have been playmates, chums, companions; because I am going one way and you another, and our paths may widen more and more, and because—oh, Leigh, because I want you.”
He leaned against the back of the seat and gently put one hand on her arm.
The yellow August sunshine lay on the level prairies beyond the river. The shining thread of waters wound away across the landscape under a play of light and shadow. The clover sod at their feet was soft and green. The big golden sunflowers hung on their stalks along the border of the lawn, and overhead the ripple of the summer 279 breezes in the cottonwoods made a music like pattering raindrops. Under their swaying boughs Leigh Shirley stood, a fair, sweet girl. And nothing in the languorous beauty of the midsummer afternoon could have been quite so pleasing without her presence there.
She looked down at Thaine’s big brown hand resting against her white arm, and then up to his handsome face.
“It would only make trouble for, for everybody. No, I’m coming home with the crowd on the hayrack.” She lifted her arm and began to pull the petals from a tiny sunflower that lay on the seat beside her.
“Very well.” There was no anger in Thaine’s tone. “Do you remember the big sunflower we found to send to Prince Quippi, once?”
“The one that should bring him straight from China to me, if he really cared for me?” Leigh asked.
“You said that one was to tell him that you loved him and you knew it would bring him to you. But he never came.”