David was not at home, and Blair was glad of the chance to wait for him—so long as Mrs. Richie let him lounge on the grass at her feet. His adoration of David's mother, begun in his childhood, had strengthened with his years; perhaps because she was all that his own mother was not.
"Blair," she said, "of course you and I both realize that Elizabeth is only a child, and you are entirely too wise to talk seriously about being engaged to her. She is far too young for that sort of thing. Of course you understand that?"
And Blair, feeling as though the sword of manhood had been laid on his shoulder, and instantly forgetting the smaller pride of being "engaged," said in a very mature voice, "Oh, certainly I understand."
If, in the dusk of stars and fireflies, with the fragrance of white stocks blossoming near the stone bench that circled the old hawthorn-tree in the middle of the garden—if at that moment Mrs. Richie had demanded Elizabeth's head upon a charger, Blair would have rejoiced to offer it. But this serene and gentle woman was far too wise to wring any promise from the boy, although, indeed, she had no opportunity, for at that moment Mr. Ferguson knocked on the green door between the two gardens and asked if he might come in and smoke his cigar in his neighbor's garden. "I'll smoke the aphids off your rose-bushes," he offered. "You are very careless about your roses!"
"A 'bad tenant'?" said Mrs. Richie, smiling. And poor Blair picked himself up, and went sulkily off.
But Mrs. Richie's flattering assumption that Blair and she looked at things in the same way, and David's apparent indifference to Elizabeth's emotions, made the childish love-affair wholesomely commonplace on both sides. By mid-September it was obvious that the prospect of college was attractive to Blair, and that the moment of parting would not be tragic to Elizabeth. The romance did not come to a recognized end, however, until a day or two before Blair started East. The four friends, and Miss White, had gone out to Mrs. Todd's, where David had stood treat, and after their tumblers of pink and brown and white ice-cream had been emptied, and Mrs. Todd had made her usual joke about "good-looking couples," they had taken two skiffs for a slow drift down the river to Willis's.
When they were rowing home again, the skiffs at first kept abreast, but gradually, in spite of Miss White's desire to be "at her post," and David's entire willingness to hold back, Blair and Elizabeth appropriately fell behind, with only a little shaggy dog, which Elizabeth had lately acquired, to play propriety. In the yellow September afternoon the river ran placidly between the hills and low-lying meadows; here and there, high on a wooded hillside, a maple flamed among the greenness of the walnuts and locusts, or the chestnuts showed the bronze beginnings of autumn. Ahead of them the sunshine had melted into an umber haze, which in the direction of Mercer deepened into a smudge of black. Elizabeth was twisting her left hand about to get different lights on her ring, which she had managed to slip on her finger when Cherry-pie was not looking. Blair, with absent eyes, was singing under his breath:
"'Oh! I came to a river, an' I couldn't get across;
Sing "Polly-wolly-doodle" all the day!
An' I jumped upon a nigger, an' I thought he was a hoss;
Sing Polly-wolly—'
"Horrid old hole, Mercer," he broke off, resting on his oars and letting the boat slip back on the current.
"I like Mercer!" Elizabeth said, ceasing to admire the ring. "Since you've come home from boarding-school you don't like anything but the East." She began to stroke her puppy's head violently. Blair was silent; he was looking at a willow dipping its swaying finger-tips in the water.