“You don’t mean ‘never,’” said the girl, hotly, over her shoulder; “you’re tired and cross, and you’ve lost your last remnant of temper. You’re in a pretty state of mind to come proposing to a girl.”
“Good-bye, Nina,” he continued, calmly. “Tell your next admirer that I said you were a nice little girl, but you have a d— a dragon of a temper.”
“Good-bye, monster,” she called after him, as he took up his hat and strode away. “You’re a nice man, but you’re getting stout and middle-aged, and you’re a great deal older than I am, and the bald spot in the middle of your head is increasing, and I just hate you—I hate you.”
Wincing under the dainty brutality of her personal allusions, the man clapped his hat on his head and quickened his steps. His gravity of manner was all gone. No one in the world had power to stir him as this slip of a girl had.
She watched him going, dashing the tears from her eyes as she watched. He had passed the rose-bush, the ugly rose-bush that never bore anything but worm-eaten roses. She wished that a tempest would come and tear it from its roots. He had stumbled over the big mossy stone by the well, the miserable stone on which every one tripped. She wished he would fall down and break a limb. He had passed the first row of gooseberry-bushes. Why did they not stretch out their thorny arms and tear his clothes?
Now he had reached the second row of gooseberries. “Pirate!” she shrieked, wrathfully, after him.
He would not reply to her. He was fumbling with the fastening of the gate,—the old-fashioned fastening that her father was always forgetting to have mended. She hoped that he might be detained there an hour. No, a gate would not stop him. He had placed a hand on it, and had vaulted over. Now he had disappeared.
She would run to the gate to see the last of him, and she slipped down the tree-trunk like a lithe little cat. “That stupid fastening!” and she furiously rattled the gate. Then she climbed over. She would follow him just for fun—not with the idea of appeasing him.
For some seconds she trotted silently after him down the dusty road. Then she called gently, “Esteban!”
He did not turn. He had said the second row of gooseberry-bushes, and now he was crossing the Rubicon. And he always kept his word.