How well she remembered his suspicious, exacting questions!
“He is my best friend,” she said proudly.
“I wish I was in heaven,” he said, his voice grown weak. “Every thing goes wrong with me; every thing has gone wrong all my life. Father is in a rage because I will not stay home; he offered me to-day the deed for two hundred acres as a bribe. I should be stronger to-day but that he worked my life out when I was a growing boy.”
“A country life is best for you. Your old homestead is the loveliest place around, with its deep eaves and dormer-windows and vines. That wide hall is one of my pleasant recollections, and the porch that looks into the garden, the blue hills away off, and the cool woods, the thrushes and the robins and the whip-poor-will at twilight; that solitary note sets me to crying, or it used to when I dreamed dreams and told them to Laura! I hope that Laura will love the place too well to leave it; it is my ideal of a home; much more than splendid Old Place is.”
“I will stay if you will come and live in it with me,” he said quietly.
“I like my own home better,” she answered as quietly. “Are you stronger than you were?”
“Much stronger. I have not had one of those attacks since March. Lake warns me; but I am twice the man that he is! How he coughed last winter! I haven’t any thing to live for, anyway.”
“It is very weak for you to say that.”
“Whose fault is it that I am so weak? Whose fault is it that my life is spoiled? You have spoiled every thing for me by playing fast and loose with me.”
“I never did that,” she answered indignantly. “You accuse me wrongfully.”