“Yes; it was all too bad, Zee; but we’ll find better things ahead—I’m sure of it.”
She was not ready to look into the future. Her mind was still busy with the year that had just ended.
“I said so many things that I did not mean, sometimes, and I was hard—on you, when you meant to be kind; but I’m sorry now.”
“You were a little hard on me now and then, but I think I liked it. Some day I shall laugh about it.”
“I don’t see how you ever could,” she declared severely.
“I was thinking of the moose,” he answered, smiling down on her. “It was your idea that I lacked enterprise; I wasn’t the venturesome knight you had hoped to see. You liked to make me humble by setting goals for me in new fields that you knew well enough I could never reach. That was the way of it, wasn’t it, Zee?”
“It was very foolish of me. I really never meant anything at all about the moose—and things like that.”
“Don’t take it back! I’m still going to get the moose or his equivalent. I’m going to do something quite large and fine before I give up the fight, only I want you to make it worth while.”
He rested one hand on the back of a chair; the other was dropped lightly into the pocket of his coat. His gray eyes, when she looked up at him, were steady and kind. He had not the appearance of a defeated man. She had once heard Mr. Carr say that Morris Leighton was a fellow who “got things done,” and the remembrance of this did not reassure her.
“I hope—I know—you will be a successful man,” she said slowly, “and now let us be good friends.”