“Darling, you’re worth more than all the rest of the world put together. Don’t talk to me like that. But I can’t touch your money, truly, dear, I can’t; so don’t ask me.”
“Idiot,” cried Dorothy, with tears raining down her face, “don’t you know I’d go with you if you had to grind an organ in the street, and collect the money for you in a tin cup till we got enough for a monkey? What kind of a dinky little silver-plated wedding present do you think I am, anyway? You——”
The rest of it was sobbed out, incoherently enough, on his hitherto immaculate shirt-front. “You don’t mind,” she whispered, “if I cry down your neck, do you?”
“If you’re going to cry,” he answered, his voice trembling, “this is the one place for you to do it, but I don’t want you to cry.”
“I won’t, then,” she said, wiping her eyes on a wet and crumpled handkerchief. In a time astonishingly brief to one hitherto unfamiliar with the lachrymal function, her sobs had ceased.
“You’ve made me cry nearly a quart since morning,” she went on, with assumed severity, “and I hope you’ll behave so well from now on that I’ll never have to do it again. Look here.”
She led him to the window, where a pair of robins were building a nest in the boughs of a maple close by. “Do you see those birds?” she demanded, pointing at them with a dimpled, rosy forefinger.
“Yes, what of it?”
“Well, they’re married, aren’t they?”
“I hope they are,” laughed Harlan, “or at least engaged.”