"You ain't pryin'," the boy defended, "and it's comin' on great. I took your advice. I just let myself do all the lovin' I could 'thout stewin' over her feelin's fer me, and then all of a sudden she up and told me she always had loved me, only she was afeard I didn't kire fer her."
Uncle Ambrose's face shone. "A'ire you worth her now, sonnie?"
"Lord, no," the boy answered; "but I kep' straight since that night and I'll keep on. It's lovin' that done it."
Uncle Ambrose raised his rusty stovepipe hat. "Lovin', that's it," he answered.
And then across his wrinkled face there marched a host of memories, while keeping his eyes on the sky among whose soft clouds there might easily have been floating any number of angels, he repeated the toast made immortal by Kentuckians: "The ladies, God bless 'em!"
Suddenly hearing the noise of a horse's hoofs trotting away from the neighbourhood of the farmhouse, Ambrose whirled, and before his companion could guess what ailed him, started running back across the lawn.
But this time Peachy was not to be so easily found. Uncle Ambrose searched for her in the yard and in the garden, in the place where the old summer house, now a ruin, had once stood, and then when the sun had disappeared and only an afterglow remained, found her leaning over a turnstile facing an orchard.
"I hope I ain't kept you waitin', Peachy," he remarked, a trifle breathlessly.
The woman smiled and slipped her arm through his that they might both lean together on the turnstile. "Most forty years, Ambrose," she returned with a finer enjoyment than she could have felt in her youth.