“How much longer am I to wait?” he repeated; and she answered, “Wait for what?”
“For you,” and Hugh arose and went and stood over her as he continued: “Do you know how old I am?”
Her face was scarlet now, but she answered laughingly, “I am thirty. You used to be four years older than myself, which makes you thirty-four.”
“Yes,” he said. “As time goes I am thirty-four, but measured by my feelings it is a hundred years since that morning when I saw you going through the Park gate and felt that I had lost you, as I knew I had afterwards, and never more so than when I saw you in the cemetery and knew who you were.”
“Why are you reminding me of all this? Don’t you know how it hurts? I know you despised me then, and must despise me now,” Mildred said, with anguish in her tones as she, too, rose from her chair and stood apart from him.
“I did despise you then, it’s true,” Hugh replied, “and tried to think I hated you, not so much for deceiving us as for deceiving your husband, as I believed you must have done; but I know better now. Your record has not been stainless, Milly, and I would rather have you as you were seventeen years ago on the summer morning when you were a little girl of thirteen shelling peas and prophesying that you would one day be the mistress of Thornton Park. You have been its mistress, and I am sorry for that, but nothing can kill my love, which commenced in my boyhood, when you made fun of my hands and feet and brogue and called me freckled and awkward, and then atoned for it all by some look in your bright eyes which said you did not mean it. I am awkward still, but the frecks and the brogue are gone, and I have come to ask you to be my wife,—not to-morrow, but some time next spring, when everything is beginning new. Will you, Milly? I will try and make you happy, even if I have but little money.
“Oh, Hugh! What do I care for money. I hate it!”
It was the old Mildred who spoke in the old familiar words, which Hugh remembered so well, but it was the new Mildred who, when he held his arms towards her, saying “Come,” went gladly into them, as a tired child goes to its mother.
It was late that night when Hugh left his promised bride, for there was much to talk about, and all the incidents of their childhood to be lived over again, Hugh telling of the lock of hair and the pea-pod he had kept with the peas, hard as bullets now, especially the smaller one, which he called Mildred.
“But, do you know, I really think it has recently begun to change,” Hugh said, “and I shall not be surprised to find it soft again——”