"But what about the cooking?" demanded Marjorie presently.
"It's been all right while you were sick. We are going to get through sooner than I thought."
"Oh, I'm so glad," she sighed. "I really did want you to get the work done, and succeed—I never hated you that much, at the worst."
"Don't talk about the work!" he said passionately. "The work didn't matter a bit. And I tell you this, Marjorie, if I can help it you shall never do another stroke of work as long as you live!"
"That's going too far, as usual," said Marjorie calmly. "You certainly are a tempestuous person, Francis Ellison! I'd be unhappy without something to do. . . . May I play on the banjo sometimes in the evening, and will you stay quite close to me when I do?"
"You mean——" he asked.
"I mean that you didn't destroy all those notes when you lost your temper with me. To begin with, you left note-shaped places in the dust, on all the things you had put there for me—you really will have to let me do a little dusting occasionally, dear!—and so I hunted. One note was under the fresh banjo strings. . . . And you may well be glad you forgot it."
"Why, dearest? Did it make you a little sorry for me?"
"Oh, so sorry! In spite of all you'd said and done, somehow—somehow when I read that I think I began to fall in love with you all over again. . . . I cried, I know. I didn't know then that was what was the matter with me, but I know now it was. You had wanted me so much, there in our dear little cabin; and try as I would to keep telling myself that it was a last year's you, it kept feeling like a this year's."
"It was," he said fervently. "It was this year's, and every year's, as long as we both live."