Nancy looked a bit doubtful. But no, he wasn't poking fun. And after a pause, he asked, as one putting himself to the test:
"Miss Anne—Nancy—do you think you could be happy—with me?"
"You?" breathed Nancy, all a-tremble. She thought she could be happier with Glenn than with anybody else. Why! there wasn't anybody else! That is, nobody that cared. She was afraid to say so. But her moved and changed face said it for her.
"Because, if you could be happy with me, why shouldn't you be?" asked Glenn, brilliantly. But Nancy understood, and her heart crowded into her throat with delight, and terror, and a sort of agony. She felt that she loved and adored this boy to distraction. She would have adored anybody who loved and desired her, who found her fair. But she didn't understand that; neither did Glenn.
"You care?" said the boy, leaning toward her. They were running slowly, along a road high above the river. "Nancy, you care?"
Care? Of course she cared! She considered him the most beautiful and desirable of mortals; she was so enraptured, so thrilled with the astounding fact that he cared for her, that she couldn't speak, but looked at him with swimming eyes. He brought the car to a stop, slipped an arm around her shoulder, and drew her close. She knew that something momentous was going to happen to her, and looked at him, full of a sweet terror. "I love you!" said Glenn, and kissed her on the mouth.
His beard was the ghost of down on his cheek; her hair hung in a braid to her waist; their kiss was the kiss of youth,—tender, passionately pure. Everything but that morning face, pale with young emotion, looking at her with enamored eyes, vanished from her mind; everything else counted for nothing, went like chaff upon the wind. The one fact alone remained: Glenn loved her! Her senses were in a delicious tumult from the power and the glory of it: Glenn loved her! It was as if a skylark sang in her breast, as if she walked in a rosy and new-born world. Had Nancy been called upon to die for him then, she would have gone to her death shining-eyed, fleet-footed, joyous.
"I love you, I love you!" Glenn repeated it like a litany. "Nancy! Does it make you as happy because I love you as it makes me because you love me?"
"Oh, ten thousand times ten thousand times more!" she said fervently.
"I think it was your hair I fell in love with, first off," he told her presently. "I have never seen a girl with such hair, and such a lot of it. I'm crazy about your hair, Nancy."