“Why not?” he asked, coolly.
“Because you will make me—make me—” She choked and stammered, and could not proceed.
“Make you what?” he said, gravely. “I shall not force you to be my wife, if that is what you mean. I hope—I want you to consent to live with me sometime; but I give you my word that, if you do not come willingly, you come not at all.”
“It isn’t that,” she cried, trying to stamp her foot, but only agitating it violently in the unresisting air. “I know I will give in, I know I will go, I know you will make me mind you—you will make me glad to do it. Oh, I am so angry!”
She was indeed angry, and the pink fingers were now raging among the willow leaves, and stripping them from their twigs. “And you don’t love me,” she went on, furiously, “you only love having your own detestable way.”
“So you think I don’t love you,” he said, meditatively.
“Of course you don’t. You never blush when you see me, you never stammer when you talk. You take everything for granted. Other men don’t act like that.”
“What do I want to blush for? I have done nothing to be ashamed of,” he said, doggedly, “and why should I stammer? I have got a straight tongue in my head, and how do you know what other men do?”
“Don’t I read books,—don’t I see them? There’s one boy in Rubicon Meadows turns perfectly purple when he sees me. I don’t like having known you ever since I was a baby. I wish you would go away and let me alone,” and she sulkily executed a movement on the branch by which her back was turned on him.
“All right; I have dangled about you long enough. Now I will give place to the Rubicon Meadows boys. You have played fast and loose with me about our engagement, and I don’t believe you ever intend to marry me. If you don’t call me back before I get to that second row of gooseberry-bushes you will never see me again.”