"I dare you."
"I take you—but" seeing that Mrs. Whitcomb was trying to overhear, she whispered: "let's pretend it's the scenery."
So Ira rose, pushed the checkers aside, and said in an unusually positive tone: "Ah, Miss Gattle, won't you have a look at the landscape?"
"Oh, thank you, Mr. Lathrop," said Anne, "I just love scenery."
They wandered forth like the Sleeping Beauty and her princely awakener, and never dreamed what gigglings and nudgings and wise head-noddings went on back of them. Mrs. Wellington laughed loudest of all at the lovers whose heads had grown gray while their hearts were still so green.
It was shortly after this that the Wellingtons themselves came into prominence in the train life.
As the train approached Green River, and its copper-basined stream, the engineer began to set the air-brakes for the stop. Jimmie Wellington, boozily half-awake in the smoking room, wanted to know what the name of the station was. Everybody is always eager to oblige a drunken man, so Ashton and Fosdick tried to get a window open to look out.
The first one they labored at, they could not budge after a biceps-breaking tug. The second flew up with such ease that they went over backward. Ashton put his head out and announced that the approaching depot was labelled "Green River." Wellington burbled: "What a beautiful name for a shtation."
Ashton announced that there was something beautifuller still on the platform—"Oh, a peach!—a nectarine! and she's getting on this train."
Even Doctor Temple declared that she was a dear little thing, wasn't she?