“Won’t you be serious, Nan?” he pleaded. “I am very serious.”
“You must be, to be thinking of marriage.”
“I am going away, Nan—to-morrow, very early. I came to say good-bye.”
Her eyelids flickered, and in that moment a discerning glance would have detected a gleam of alarm from her blue eyes. But there was no hint of it in her voice.
“I thought you said it was to marry me you came.”
“Why will you be teasing me? It means so much to me, Nan. I want you to say that you’ll wait for me; that you’ll marry me some day.”
He was very close to her. She looked up at him a little breathlessly. Her feminine intuitions warned her that he was about to take a liberty; feminine perversity prompted her to frustrate the intention, although it was one that in her heart she knew would gladden her.
“Some day?” she mocked him. “When you’re grown up, I suppose? Why, I’ll be an old maid by then; and I don’t think I want to be an old maid.”
“Answer me, Nan. Don’t rally me. Say that you’ll wait.”